I'd say that dictionaries are only the obvious "right" way if you're not planning on accessing any of their fields. Otherwise you have some set of expected fields, in which case you can define a namedtuple and avoid a vast array of nasty surprises. It's really easy to initialize a namedtuple from a dict (use ), as long as the dict has the right fields. If it doesn't, and you're planning on using its fields, the fact that this raises an exception is a good thing.

What do you think of this library: https://github.com/selik/destructure

It'll enforce schema and destructure the nested dict/list that results from JSON decoding.

That's like asking, "What data structure should I use for this CSV file?"

Depends on the usage. Sometimes you leave them as nested dictionaries and lists. Sometimes you transform them into tabular data. Sometimes you aggregate, etc.

Namedtuples or classes that represent the data, I'd suggest personally.

I would agree. Namedtuple has an asdict method so that reserialization to JSON is simple; you can do the same for a class.