InChI is not closer but actually further than SMILES or SD files for many of the use cases you wanted. It is not a supported capability to turn an InChI into a

InChI is not closer but actually further than SMILES or SD files for many of the use cases you wanted. It is not a supported capability to turn an InChI into a structure, which makes it hard to generate, say, a fingerprint for a Tanimoto search system. (Yes, the command-line tools and its wrappers support that, but the InChI developers do not condone its use. Even if you do so, the output may differ from your input structure in ways you disagree with.) InChI is only closer for the classical purpose of chemical documentation - record association and text-based search. That is not a bad thing, but given the entirety of your goals, it is equally correct to use "close" for SMILES, SLN, SD, Mol2, etc.