[graemep]

I do not think the argument is that ALL data should be in human readable form, but I think there are far more cases of data being in a binary form when it would be better human readable. Your example of a case where it is human readable when it should be binary is rarer for most of us.

In some cases human readable data is for interchange and it should be processed and queried in other forms - e.g. CSV files to move data between databases.

An awful lot of data is small - and these days I think you can say small is quite a bit bigger than 10Mb.

Quite a lot of data that is extracted from a large system would be small at that point, and would benefit from being human readable.

The benefit of data being human readable is not necessarily that you will read it all, but that it is easier to read bits that matter when you are debugging.