I am not arguing for another format. I am arguing for using a program to edit these files, to avoid syntax errors and other crap that arises when people do manual stuff that doesn't need to be done manually. And sure the format can stand to be slightly more complex, who cares if you're not editing it by hand.

Ascii text format is simple.

Anything where you have arbitrarily complex structure, why not use a program to edit it? What is the downside of using the right tool for the job? Your text editor is a program. Why tunnel through text and manually edit stuff?