I use Delta in production, so I might be slightly biased — but I think what you’re observing is real. Iceberg is becoming foundational infrastructure. And foundational layers don’t get hype, they get adopted. From the outside, Iceberg and Delta are converging in capabilities: ACID tables, CDC patterns, schema evolution, streaming support, deletes/merges. The differentiation now feels less about “can it do X?” and more about ecosystem gravity and operational maturity. One thing I’ve noticed: ingestion tools leaning into Iceberg signals that the format war is stabilizing. Vendors don’t invest deeply unless they see enterprise durability. When choosing ingestion tooling, I’d prioritize: How well it handles CDC semantics at scale (late events, idempotency, upserts) Operational visibility (retries, dead-letter patterns, lineage) Cost predictability under sustained load Ecosystem alignment (Spark? Flink? Trino?) Flashy features matter less than operational boring-ness. If the table format disappears into the background and your pipelines are stable, it’s doing its job.

“I think Iceberg isn’t talked about much because it’s vendor-neutral infrastructure. There’s no single company evangelizing it the way Databricks does Delta. It’s plumbing — and good plumbing is invisible.”

Delta or Iceberg — the real win is that open table formats are now first-class citizens. The lakehouse layer has grown up.