Excellent question and in fact we aimed for Snapcast from the beginning!

Long story short is that we have been looking into making snapcast our "builtin" protocol for streaming audio. So we would run it on ESPHome devices (such as the VPE), the webbrowser, everywhere.

But... it has so many downsides and on top of that the maintainer is not very interested/active anymore (yes, we have reached out to him) so we decided to create (yes, yet another!) protocol. One that would fulfill all our needs and would work across the internet and suitable for low powered devices like the ESP32.

It will support (perfect) synced playback by default but can also switch codecs on the fly, making it suitable …