Being able to inspect messages is down to the proper tooling. But I can certainly understand where you are coming from. I've designed several text based proto

Being able to inspect messages is down to the proper tooling. But I can certainly understand where you are coming from. I've designed several text based protocols in my time for that exact reason. And I still do for stuff that I positively know will never require any sort of performance (mostly on embedded systems, somewhat ironically since those are sometimes constrained down to just a few hundred bytes of memory :-))