I share your frustrations. I am enamored with serialization libaries like Protocol Buffers that schematize data in its unmarshaled form and strip the symbols f

I share your frustrations. I am enamored with serialization libaries like Protocol Buffers that schematize data in its unmarshaled form and strip the symbols from the data in its marshaled form. By representing properties of the data with codes, one is free to add/rename properties (but not remove) from the schema over time. Different versions of the schema can successfully marshal and unmarshal the same data as long as codes (and semantics of what the codes represent) never change. It's a very forwards/backwards-compatible way of working with data as long with you can handle managing semantics over time. By contrast, schema languages like JSON Schema or XML Schema may be more expressive about target language constraints than something like Protocol Buffers, but they often suffer from the brittleness of the "messages I consider correct must be considered correct by you in precisely the same way"-problem when their messages move over the wire.