I have seen this post on HN before and I wasn't received very well AFAIR.
But I can't help agreeing with its main point: so much complexity to support a few basic data types that are not sufficient for anything complex anyway.
If you haven't checked it out, NestedText is a great format that offers no handling of types beyond string/list/dict, leaving all that to the application reading in the values.
No character needs escaping.