I hate jq with the power of a million suns. The whole point of text through pipelines is that data can be processed by tools that do not understand it. Formatting it in xml or json (there's no difference) breaks this beautiful orthogonality, and forces all the intermediate tools to deal with whatever the stupid markup du jour happens to be.
What the world needs is the inverse program of "jc", where an unparseable json string is expanded into a flat list of lines all of the form "field.subfield=value"
ok well I can understand not wanting json when all you need is something simpler, but I'm not sure if I understand unparseable - I mean if it is JSON then it is parseable.
You can only parse json easily by using json libraries. Plain text, or "field=value" pairs, you can easily cut(1) or grep(1), or sed(1) to your pleasure. This is what I mean by parseable. Parseable trivially by tools that do not understand the format. I can also sed and awk json files, and I do, but it is extremely painful; and more often than not these files are nothing more than simple lists of variables with values, for which the use of json is a ridiculous overkill.