Not as absurd as you'd think. You don't want to debug the protocol itself, but you want to be able to easily read what messages were exchanged. I get the ratio

Not as absurd as you'd think. You don't want to debug the protocol itself, but you want to be able to easily read what messages were exchanged. I get the rationale. But I think it's weak, and this entire post is lots of fluff around that core rationale. (I've been writing extensible binary protocols back in 1988 - and it never struck me as particularly difficult even back then.)