[kqr]

Not only that but a fixed object format also "forces" me to parse the data in a particular way. Think of representing a table in JSON. The developer of the producer will have to pick either row-major or column-major representation and then that is how all consumers will see it. If that's the wrong representation for my task I will need to do gymnastics to fix that. (Or there needs to be a transposition utility command.)

Text gets around that problem, in a sense.

[emteycz]

Obviously JSON is not suited for tabular data, but perhaps another format could be used. Ultimately, the user shouldn't care about JSONs or tabular objects.

[ric2b]

Text just forces you into row-major, I don't see how that's getting around the problem.