I think these fears will turn out to be fairly minor in practice. I've been implementing some protocols over the last few weeks (for controlling satellite termi

I think these fears will turn out to be fairly minor in practice. I've been implementing some protocols over the last few weeks (for controlling satellite terminal units), one text based and one binary. It was a huge reminder of how much simpler a well defined binary protocol can be to implement - it took far less time (and a lot less debugging) for the binary one. Even a well specified text based protocol can have so many surprising edge cases that just don't exist in binary... It does require a bit more tooling for debugging, but that's not that hard...