I have the opposite experience, actually. Its so damn annoying to have programs communicating structured data with each other over pipes that more complicated things inevitably diverge into a) monocultural programs made with a single programming language and that don't communicate with the outside world or b) Some form of exchange format (JSON, XMl, etc) that needs to be explicitly supported by every participant.

And unix utilities suck at handling structured data. If your file format is line based you might have a chance of it being easy to work with but don't even ask what happens if you insert a newline inside a textfield then.