What's the advantage of having commissioned vs. noncommissioned officers?

Yep. A very good friend of mine actually has given me some insight into this - he became an officer in the Army at 35(!) after I’d been good friends with him for over 20 years. He was a signals officer- he explained it very similar, in that he was trained in how to manage people, and how to manage the signals stuff in broad strokes- how a network was supposed to be set up, how the radios were used, etc… but he wasn’t expected to say… know how to crimp a cat 5 cable, configure a router, or actually set up or work the radios themselves. Those were things that the enlisted people under him did.

Probably not as much as you’d think; from what I can tell, if you’re a motivated person, they’ll pay for you to do one of two things- do some kind of delayed enlistment while you get your 4 year degree, at completion of which you’ll enlist and go to OCS, or if you’re already enlisted, you can get a degree on the government’s dime, and then apply to OCS after you have it. I suspect if you’re not motivated enough to have a degree or get a degree on their nickel, they aren’t terribly interested in making you an officer.

That said, in the Army at least, if you’re not coming from a service academy or ROTC, you actually have to enlist, and then go to OCS. So you go through basic training and some other stuff just like any other enlisted person before you become an officer. My friend said that getting his commission was probably the single weirdest thing, in that his status instantly changed and people who were friendly were now standoffish, and he got saluted by people who didn’t do it the day before, and so on.