[zokier]

> It would be nice if we could agree that each command has --json flag (for example) which will make the output trivial to parse programmatically in any other advanced shell.

That's part of the solution, but I think a signaling layer of sorts is needed too so that the reading side knows that the data is structured instead of just bytes. So basically instead of needing explicit

    > foo --json | from json | ...

You could have

    > foo --json | ...

From there it would then be easy to have env var or something instead of explicit cmdline flag to eventually end up with (almost) seamless

    > foo | ...