Name sounded familiar. Read the post, loved the weirdness of it. Then, flashback. Oracle sqlnet! The original distributed processing framework of the greybeards and Oak Table knights. Anyone remember Oak Table?
Python support of Iceberg seems to be the biggest unrealized opportunity right now. SQL support seems to be in good shape, with DuckDB and such, but Python support is still quite nascent.
We did an evaluation of various REST catalog options and went with Open Catalog from Snowflake (a Polaris-based managed service that works independently from their data warehousing solution). Lakekeeper is nice - it's one of the few catalogs with FGAC and table maintenance.