Stepping just a little beyond regular ‘loop and filter’ is already difficult without consulting the manual each time — being exacerbated by the impossibility of finding those things in the manual without skimming through most of it. Making an ‘if’ for variations in the input structure is easily a twenty-minute job. Outside of the basic features, Jq's syntax is increasingly arcane and unintuitive—maybe those working with it daily do remember the ‘advanced’ stuff, but I don't.

I actually collected a sizable list of alternatives to Jq:

https://github.com/TomConlin/json2xpath

https://github.com/antonmedv/fx

https://github.com/simeji/jid

https://github.com/jmespath/jp

https://jsonnet.org

https://github.com/borkdude/jet

https://github.com/jzelinskie/faq

https://github.com/dflemstr/rq

https://github.com/mgdm/htmlq

And there's someone else's list of stuff around Jq: https://github.com/fiatjaf/awesome-jq

However, personally I think that next time I might instead fire up Hy, and use the regular syntax with the functional approach for any convoluted processing I come up with. Last time I mentioned this, another HNer made a Jq-like tool with Lisp-like syntax: https://github.com/cube2222/jql (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21981158).