[akshayshah]

> But there's no reason you'd ever do the inverse, pushing protobuf schemas around with no intent to handle the wire format.

You could be writing a linter, a formatter, an implementation of the Language Server Protocol, a compiler that's not protoc, a way to apply semantic patches to large numbers of Protobuf schemas, or any number of other useful tools. There's clearly at least some demand for tools like this - partial implementations of most of these exist, often with some corporate backing.

Unless you're implementing a Protobuf runtime (google.golang.org/protobuf in Go, upb for Python, etc.), your experience seems unusual to me - most developers I've encountered read and write the wire format using one of the existing runtimes.

That said, it does sound like a lot of fun - especially if it's in lisp!