Spoiler: it's Parquet.

Parquet is great but I'd argue ndjson[1] is closer to "modern" CSV. That is, people who like to describe things as "modern" and "elegant" are likely to want JSON everywhere ;-)

[1]: Newline-delimited JSON, http://ndjson.org/

It is clever but I can imagine the comments the OP would've gotten if posting "CSVi" and it didn't use vi-like keyboard shortcuts!

CSVi is cute and clever in exactly the way you don't want to be. It loses the entire audience of people who are Excel jockeys working with CSV files and maybe frustrated with the experience. Software engineers and system admins know what vi is. The rest of the world doesn't.

The worse is the people who do know what vi is, and assume that it's a vi plugin or worse, an editor using vi bindings, and ignore it.

You know that was my first though as well (new CSV version), but then I thought that a new version wouldn't make sense since (1) there is already a specification (the RFC), and (2) those who don't care about the current RFC won't care about a new spec, either.

CSV is one of those things that are everywhere because it is “obvious”. Then we have to deal with 100 interpretations of “obvious” decades later, since not enough people care about standardization.