[rlpb]

Your gripes all seem to boil down to your unfamiliarity, rather than anything specific that stands on its own as a problem. Unfamiliarity is understandable, but if that were enough to avoid progress, we wouldn't never have progress.

> ctrl+C because it's taking too long

Try --since=today. Then you end up in less, and that should be more familiar, including for search. This is then the equivalent of traditional daily rotating log files, with no other knowledge needed apart from --since and --unit (the latter is noted in "systemctl status" output as a reminder).

Then every further feature is an optional bonus.

[ghostpepper]

As other commenters have mentioned, the unfamiliarity is a symptom of the time I spend using less,grep,sed,sort.. etc on a daily basis. If I could use those journalctl flags for everything I do relating to files on the system then I would be very familiar with them.

It's the same rule I use when purchasing kitchen equipment - often it's better to have a single multi-purpose tool than a bunch of specific implements. Otherwise you end up with a drawer full of strawberry-stem removers, pizza slicers, corn-cob peelers, avocado-slicers, etc.

This is to say nothing of the binary format issues that others have discussed.