Why would a QB have better spread than 4 COBs lumped in the middle? It's the same amount of light coming from the same small area. It all spreads out in 10" already and you really need to hang a QB288 at 18" to get the light to spread over the whole 2x2. At that distance there is no difference between 288 separate SMDs or 4 COBs (BTW also with a few hundred diodes inside).
The problem is that you can't easily get the edges of the grow lit up when the light is all lumped in the middle. This is what you get with a QB in a 2x2 or 4xQB in a 4x4 even at 18":
View attachment 4084125 View attachment 4084126
That is just incredibly poor uniformity even at what is an extreme height for leds. It's really the minimum acceptable for growing plants. While with led strips you get pretty much uniform light everywhere at already 6". See the animation tomate posted a bit up.
So what you see people do to fix this problem is to put COBs around the QBs or they run those expensive boards at say 50W instead of 135W and then simply use just as many as they did with COBs before. Costs a fortune, but indeed that will be a better light spread than the COB fixture they had before. But then you can do the same (actually better) with a led strips costing 60% of that.
Or you really need to increase the height to 18" and run with that poorly uniform lighting. The problem with that height is that wall losses increase with the amount of wall exposed to the light. For every inch the height increases you will lose around 2% to 4% of the light depending on reflectivity of the walls.
Spread 4 COBs around each over a sqft and you can drop the light to 10". Spread it over 4 led strips and you can drop to 6". That's easily a gain of 30% in total light. And you'd spend only 60% on the cobs or strips. Those Ledgardner PPFD maps above show even bigger wall losses (40% for 12" or 60% for the full 18"), but then he uses a tent with "white poly" lining so his wall losses will be on the high side.
It all works fine, but I think it would have been a lot better if people tried to improve led strip fixtures and come up with kits for that instead of the boards. It seems like half the forum is having their own board clones made in China.