You're conflating two different concerns: 1. human review 2. scripting / automation In case one, human readable formats are obviously preferable. But the mom

You're conflating two different concerns: 1. human review 2. scripting / automation In case one, human readable formats are obviously preferable. But the moment you need to script a command, you want it in a machine readable format. A perfect example of the differences between the two are how badly spaces in file names are handled. Granted POSIX deserve a lot of the blame here too.