[ghshephard]

Not to mention 99.9% of the searches one does of a log file isn't really that complex. Heck, I'm willing to wager that 90% + of my searches over the last 20 years have been in log files from a particular day.

That's the thing about having simple text log files - the cognitive load required to pull data out of them, often into a format that can then be manipulated by another tool (awk, being one of the more well known), is so low that you can perform them without a context switch.

If you have a problem, you can reach into the log files, pull out the data you need, possibly massage/sum/count particular records with awk, all without missing a beat.

This is particularly important for sysadmins who may be managing dozens of different applications and subsystems. Text files pull all of them together.

But, and here is the most important thing that people need to realize - for scenarios in which complex searching is required, by all means move it into a binary format - that just makes sense if you really need to do so.

The argument isn't all text instead of binary, it is at least text and then use binary where it makes sense.