[sverige]

> You're not losing anything with this approach.

True, but you are adding something. And if you add things you don't really need, it becomes plain old cruft.

Like the others above, I understand the urge to make some things simpler by adding complexity, but for the long haul I'm convinced it's better to keep tools simple and add any needed complexity to the code you're writing (whether it's shell scripts or anything else). And then document the complexity so future you or some poor stranger can understand why the hell you did that in the first place.

But I don't look forward to reading comments like "X was deprecated so we're converting these tables back to text streams so they can be converted back to Y properly."