Which complexity are you referring to, specifically where CRDB has a better approach?
Interested as we are evaluating both.
CockroachDB is full SQL ACID database. With transactions, consistent indexes, joins. It's also strongly consistent overall.
Cassandra is really just a key-value store, with a hierarchy of sorting keys as part of the key, so that you can do range scans with good performance (and various access patterns). Indexes are asynchronously updated (as far as I know). No transactions nor joins. Its consistency is varying (configurable).
Also, Apache Cassandra and DataStax Cassandra did a hard split recently, so the docs are no longer in sync, making it a lot harder to search for stuff if you're using Apache Cassandra.
Also, patch versions of Cassandra are not guaranteed to be binary compatible (sstables), [so upgrading from 3.0.5 to 3.0.9](https://gist.github.com/shyamsalimkumar/49a61e5bc6f403d20c55...)? Expect a long migration.
That being said I'm very excited about CockroachDB. Cassandra did not live up to the hype for me because of the complexity and now that DataStax has split up with Apache in a weird way, it feels like a less appealing option.