I like that jq's query expression syntax is command line (bash) friendly. My hunch is that xpath expressions would be awkward to work with.

I've done too much xpath, xquery, xslt, css selectors. For my own work (dog fooding), I settled on mostly using very simple globbing expressions. Then use the host language's 'foreach' equiv for iterating result sets.

Globbing's double asterisk wildcard is the feature I most miss in other query engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_%28programming%29

Looping back to command line xpath: there's always some impedance match between the query and host languages. IIRC, one of the shells, like chubot's oilshell or fish?, has more rational expression evaluation (compared to bash).

You especially see this with regexs. It's a major language design fail that others haven't adopted Perl's first class regex intrinsics. C# has LINQ, sure. But that's more xquery than xpath. And I've never liked xquery.

In other words, "blue collar" programming languages should have intrinsic path expressions. Whatever the syntax.

YMMV.