jq is a great tool but I wanted something that was more seamless than piping data to jq with a jq script quoted as a parameter. I wanted something where the shell itself could fragment and understand structured data (and not just JSON but YAML, TOML, HCL, CSV, XML, etc - though XML is proving more a great deal more troublesome than I'd hoped).

I'm not suggesting the work I'm doing is any better that jq though - there's a lot of areas where jq will run circles around my shell. I see it more as different design goals but with a fairly large area of overlap.

What is HCL? This? https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

Yeah. Personally I hate it. But it's what Terraform uses so sometimes it's handy having another tool to pull bits from Terraform scripts.