Yes, basically. Someone in power should just pick any format - modified JSON (without the integers are really IEEE754 floats stupidity), s-expressions, whatever - and make standard deserializers part of the system library.

There's no authority to complain to about all this...

Structured text formats come and go: S-expressions, SGML, XML, JSON, "modified JSON", etc etc etc...

Fortunately the Unix tools work the same with any byte stream, pretty much, so they've survived gloriously since the 1970s.

That's kind of the whole deal with "worse is better."

Whoever accepts patches to base UNIX system libraries would be a good start.

> Fortunately the Unix tools work the same with any byte stream, pretty much, so they've survived gloriously since the 1970s.

So would a structured text format, except you wouldn't be discarding and then recreating semantic information at every junction of a pipe.

That can be you! Get to work, or pay someone else to get to work if the skills required aren't in your set.