[HelloNurse]

I suspect that typical interactions with ASN.1 are benign because people are interested in reading and writing a few specific preexisting data structures with whatever encoding is required for interoperability, not in designing new message structures and choosing encodings for them.

For example, when I inherited a public key signature system (mainly retrieving certificates and feeding them to cryptographic primitives and downloading and checking certificate revocation lists) everything troublesome was left by dismissed consultants; there were libraries for dealing with ASN.1 and I only had to educate myself about the different messages and their structure, like with any other standard protocol.