Given that I don't know what you do, that might be a completely reasonable solution, in your case. My background is being woken up at 3AM by alert of call for

Given that I don't know what you do, that might be a completely reasonable solution, in your case. My background is being woken up at 3AM by alert of call for systems where I have less that 100% familiarity and is asked to troubleshot. Looking at a hexdump for a format I don't know is not all that helpful. Seeming a mangled XML document, or reading the JSON output from an API call can frequently be enough to know if I need to call a developer, or if I can work with the client and fix the data. Binary formats are absolutely a valid solution of a number of problems and if it works in your context there's no reason to change it.