But if your data is structured in a semantically meaningful way, then your receiving program needs to understand those semantics. Maybe you could introduce new command line tools to refactor streams of data so as to adapt one program to another, but I can't see it being simpler and quicker (in terms of piping input from one place to another) than the current approach.

I do like the idea of a standard parser to avoid the ad-hoc implementation of parsers into everything.

Your last comment gives a hint at the real problem, which is people using command line hackery in 'permanent' solutions. It's duct tape. You don't build important system components out of duct tape. Well, you shouldn't, anyway.