[orev]

You’re talking about issues with alignment when data is displayed on a terminal or text editor, which is not at all related to data exchange.

In data exchange nobody ever allows multiple tabs between columns. If there are multiple tabs with nothing in between it means the column is empty for that row.

Just like with CSV, TSV, is always a pain to edit manually so the issues there are the same. Using tabs does have a lower likelihood of conflicting with the actual data.

[didntcheck]

This is true, but I'd assumed that one of the major reasons to use TSV is for human readability. If not, then I'd personally choose an even rarer character as my delimiter