I've always thought the same, with one exception: You can (and should) use lightweight formats that are hard to read by a human and have the shell format it to

I've always thought the same, with one exception: You can (and should) use lightweight formats that are hard to read by a human and have the shell format it to look nice. You can even format the same datum differently depending on context. I don't like the idea of using the same format for machine and human consumption, they have different requirements.