If only I could type them on my keyboard. (I think this is a big part of why CSV is the way it is — people want to be able to hand-edit it, or at least hand-produce small test datasets to test the systems on the other end.)

The funny thing is you can type any character on a keyboard. It's the same weird disconnect about "text file formats are human-readable". Either way you need a tool that can render & read the format in question. It does't much matter what format you actually store the data in, because you don't read & write the bites directly.