fundamentalists tend to be much less Uniformitarian

That's a fair point. But it seems to me that it amounts to saying that nothing in the stories in your scriptures could count as much evidence against their accuracy. (Suppose it said "And Adam, when he heard the sentence that the LORD God had passed upon him, knelt down upon the red grass and laughed for sorrow and shame" -- well, it's only uniformitarianism that entitles us to expect the grass to have been green or laughter to have been an unlikely response to sorrow and shame. Etc.)

In which case, you're also awfully limited in what conclusions you can draw from anything in those stories. "Genesis 3 indicates that God greatly values obedience to his commands." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might want something very different from us now. "The story of the Great Flood indicates that God has authority over the weather on earth." No, it indicates that he did; for all we know, he might have somehow given up that authority since then. Do these stories actually have much value, if everything they describe might have changed utterly?

(You might say that God's character and values are known to be stable, unlike the laws of physics or anything in biology. But the sources that tell you that are 2000 years old! That's, like, 25% of the entire age of the universe! If God's character and values were changing on that sort of timescale, it's perfectly possible that these ancient texts might declare them to be stable even though they aren't.)

a small to medium snake wrapped around a tree branch

I don't think I was consciously or unconsciously assuming that. But I was assuming something that's recognizably the same sort of animal as today's snakes -- God says "upon your belly shall you go", etc., not "I shall replace you with something 1/4 the size which shall go upon its belly". I think I agree, though, that the Chinese-dragon interpretation is at least kinda tenable.

Christological interpretations

OK, that's a good point. (In terms of what it says about where Christian interpretations of Genesis 3 come from; I don't think the Christian tradition of finding prophecies and parallels everywhere in the OT is actually intellectually healthy, but it's certainly a real thing.)

But ... how good is that parallel, actually? I mean, Judas is not (so far as I can tell) in any way usefully parallel to either Adam or Eve, and the temptation of Jesus seems very different in kind from that of Eve, and most of the actual opposition Jesus is reported to have had comes from very human sources.

I think if you're looking for a parallel to the temptation-and-disobedience of Adam and Eve, through which sin and death enter the world, the place you need to look is for some temptation-and-obedience of Jesus through which sin and death are conquered. And there is indeed an obvious such thing, which takes place in the (aha!) garden of Gethsemane, where he is clearly at least considering the possibility of saying "no" to what he has to do but goes ahead with it ("not my will, but yours, be done"). But this temptation is, so far as the stories say, entirely endogenous; we're shown no tempter, whether human or animal or evil spirit. So I'm not really seeing how any parallel between the Adam&Eve story and the Jesus story is made closer by having the snake in Eden be possessed by, controlled by, or an incarnation of, the devil.

That doesn't mean that the tradition that says the snake "was" the devil doesn't arise from a desire to find such parallels, of course. But it doesn't seem to me so obviously well explained in those terms as to make me abandon my more cynical theory :-).