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He doesn't come across as terribly snobbish in the essays IMO (though he does in Foucault's Pendulum, all those damn chapter epigraphs in different languages with no translations). The breadth of vocabulary is astonishing, though... you find yourself reading his stuff in "the Umberto Eco position": book in one hand, dictionary in the other...

I may be biased against Eco exactly because the Foucault's Pendulum, or maybe this is just something that gets lost in translation, being hidden between the lines in Italian, but I personally find that Eco has an attitude that makes him unpleasant. While he definitely is knowledgeable, he is the prototype of a certain kind of "intellectuals", as they are often referred to, here, who seem to strive for redundant complexity rather than clarity, and confuse erudition, or simple factual knowledge of things, with "culture", so that "the more you quote, the better you are".
There's nothing bad, in principle, in having to read a book holding a dictionary in the other hand (and that's what I did too when reading the Faucault's Pendulum, which I never finished either), but I seem to read in Eco's writings his desire to tell the known universe how much he knows, rather than bringing knowledge to the reader, if not pleasure of reading, not to mention the joy of experiencing written art. As you said, the really good story is buried deep.

He definitely uses an extraordinary vocabulary but... is he a good writer? In my opinion, not so much. He probably wants to be our contemporary Dante (haha!), but miseably fails at that. I believe many consider him a great author just because of his complexity, which to me is, in the end, just naive.

Of course, many Italians would disagree with me.