[saurik]

You are making a general argument why serialization formats should not exist. Fine, but in reality, and for any number of reasons, they do: they are easier at first, they are actually often somewhat easier over time, the pain cost that occurs is often easily amortized over time, they are fast to load (no transformations), they are fast to edit (you can often treat them as some insane memory page container and do internal allocation for updates, leaving old content begin until it is recycled), and their concept makes them capable of handling random seemingly-unrelated garbage that these mega-programs end up being popular for.

They aren't even always considered the non-ideal: I have seen many an argument from people who use Smalltalk that the ideal transfer format is to literally serialize part of the running program state and call it a "document", including whatever code might be required to operate the more epic parts of the document. (If you think about it, this is actually fairly similar to the various file formats that involve OLE, as you end up having the identifier of some code the user hopefully has installed attached with a block of data that that code hopefully can reinstate ate itself using.)

So, given that it is a tradeoff, and given that it was often a neccessary one for file formats where you want or need to be able to edit files that both contain numerous nearly-unrelated features (OLE would be the most beautiful example of this in the Word container format) where the entire contents may be larger than the RAM available to the entire computer, it simply seems silly to complain about this: man up, import the data, make your own format for saving your files, and stop complaining that someone in 1990 made something that over 22 years has become slightly difficult to understand without that historical context.