[mirimir]

When I was working as a forensic data analyst, I felt pretty much the same. If you request CSV in discovery, there's no telling what you'll get. I mean, the data may come from custom COBOL, and then get reviewed by someone using Excel.

So yes, TSV. However, I've seen TSV with spurious tabs :(

Sometimes I ended up pushing for |-delimited data. Or even fixed-width format :)