I worked on LTE stuff during a research/engineering position. It was just 1 year and not my life's work, but I had to deeply understand ASN.1 for it, and I'd ne

I worked on LTE stuff during a research/engineering position. It was just 1 year and not my life's work, but I had to deeply understand ASN.1 for it, and I'd never heard of Google's Protobuf. I didn't like ASN.1 even for its intended use case. That big type system was far more complex than necessary for the protocols I was dealing with (surrounding the EPC mainly). ASN.1 is more optimized in other ways that make sense, sacrificing some flexibility in favor of performance because the ends are expected to be more coordinated, but that's separate.