Isn’t escaping a separate orthogonal issue? Or am I misunderstanding your point? Several people have pointed out that the special ascii field separator will have to be escaped if used within a field, just like a comma is. It seems like escaping is an issue either way, and aside from that, a comma is easier in practice than a special character at every level of interaction; discovery, typing, displaying, tooling, printing, standards, etc..?

I would concede that having the special characters inside fields will be less common than having commas inside CSV field is. I guess that is worth a lot even if it doesn’t fully solve the problem.