It's not that involved to decode a standard binary protocol. At least not involved enough to justify keeping every single user on the web on a less efficient i

It's not that involved to decode a standard binary protocol. At least not involved enough to justify keeping every single user on the web on a less efficient implementation only to facilitate casual debugging with plain text tools. I'd compare that to gziping your logs and using zgrep and zcat and z<tool>. Sure it's a bit more involved but it's definitely worth the savings to gzip everything.