[skywhopper]

The brilliant thing about the status quo is that it already does accomodate both line-based and structured pipelines. There's no reason we should expect to use the same set of commands for both purposes. In fact, we most definitely shouldn't. A tool like jq is a great example of this: it works great for JSON, and it doesn't attempt to do more. When we want to work with JSON in a pipeline, we pull out jq. When we want to work with XML, we pull out xmlstarlet or the like. When we want to work with delimited columnar data, we can use awk or cut. I'm failing to see what's missing from an architectural point of view.