Yes, exactly. That would've worked if my other system would have had journalct. It is a Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and to my knowledge it does not have a package for that. Even if it had and I just did not know, that is kind of the point why binary journals (and systemd) suck.
It's not like specific part's of journalctl can't be ported to other systems and packaged separately. It's a distribution issue, not a fundamentaly flaw in binary logs.
Sure, the question is why fix something that is not broken? Why should someone write a systemd journal format reader (but journald is just an example here) when text files work already?
Why rewrite tools to support it?
If you get to the point when standard unix tools are useless, well, it's time to use a _real_ database and/or log management system. Not the time to write your own.
No one is (should be?) going around grepping 100 GBs/day worth of logs.