As other commenters have mentioned, the unfamiliarity is a symptom of the time I spend using less,grep,sed,sort.. etc on a daily basis. If I could use those journalctl flags for everything I do relating to files on the system then I would be very familiar with them.

It's the same rule I use when purchasing kitchen equipment - often it's better to have a single multi-purpose tool than a bunch of specific implements. Otherwise you end up with a drawer full of strawberry-stem removers, pizza slicers, corn-cob peelers, avocado-slicers, etc.

This is to say nothing of the binary format issues that others have discussed.