[alserio]

I agree with your other points but the first point misses the mark. Even you specify a format, you cannot use the file for exporting data between systems and organizations if they don't all agree on that format. CSV does not have a reasonable way to encode that is using a specific spec. I can open your data with my tools and silently misinterpret it. But if you are only exporting data between yourself, that's another story.

[2devnull]

You can use excel as the lingua franca. Also give them a row/col counts. Most problems solved in two easy steps.