It's not about "not always wanting to work together". It's about "i want to be able to pick the tools i use", which in turn means "the underlying data we opera

It's not about "not always wanting to work together". It's about "i want to be able to pick the tools i use", which in turn means "the underlying data we operate on needs to use a format/storage mechanism that any reasonable candidate for a tool can use" And the answer to that quandry is: plain text files.