I assume your CC2's are quite new still? We ran the last couple months of winter in 2019 with the Subaru on the new all-seasons and they did surprise me as well, how good they were in most conditions, and how little the new Xice2's were better in slush or deep snow. But the rare time I've been on older all seasons even with 8/32 tread, they were terrible!
I do think a lot of snow tires now don't have enough space and gaps between the tread blocks, to work well in slush and in dense or packed snow near the freezing point like in yoru picture, or deep snow. Optimizing tires for these conditions makes them worse on ice, and noisier and worse pavement grip, but none of them work well on freezing rain ice, so I stay home in that, and with good snow grip, I used to just find some snow to drive on when the tire tracks are ice. Our Xice2's were great on cold icy hard pack snow, but in slush they were not good, and they didn't really cut in as the slip angles increased, so not very forgiving either.
These tires on our Sentra, then Neon, and Tracker in narrow as possible sizes were great in the loose soft snow and gripped even more as the slip angle increased as they cut down even more. I used to love a fresh 4" of snow on the back roads as you could just do continuous "S" drifts down the road with total confidence they weren't going to give up once you got a bit sideways. New snow tires don't give that confidence anymore with the shoulder more optimized for pavement grip....
