Yeah the complexity of NetCDF was the ick factor that made me use GeoTIFF. It's just not the level of complexity I wanted to deal with in-program. I didn't want to wade through the details to understand the format, and I didn't want to then lock users to some subset

Seemed easier to let users preprocess their NetCDFs into GeoTIFFs manually. I have a bunch of hacky scripts to massage NetCDFs from different sources in to compatible GeoTIFFs

> meaning that you can stream subsets of GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire file for each request.

Interesting. My performance bottleneck right now is the user selects a small regions and then the program has to read in GBs of global precipitation maps (from IMERG) and cut out tiny squares. In the extreme cases it can mean ~2 minutes of waiting for a result. This means the user can't casually select and try out different regions with quick feedback. If you have a beefy machine you can keep it all in RAM sometimes and it works better.. but it's not ideal (my 16GB machine can only handle simpler scenarios)

I'll take a closer look at in the future. At the moment I just use Java's default TIFF reader and ImageBuffer class. Maybe it'd be easy to convert to COG format and adapt in a COG reader