[twir]

I see your point; although if you look at the specs for a lot of easy-to-parse formats for computers, a stated design goal is also easy-for-humans (e.g. Markdown, YAML).

Large, complex object hierarchies with lots of nesting might make more sense represented in binary (e.g. Avro).

I realize I'm making a little bit of a McLuhan-esque argument in a largely computer science-oriented context, but I hope you can see what I'm getting at.