And once this is done any user can avoid having to painstakingly construct pipelines that try to cut out the right columns to treat as numbers, or avoid all the problems parsing strings that may contain spaces or other control characters. You can do an operation like:

filter out all processes with %cpu > 20 with uid > 1000 and sort by second cmdline arg as:

dps | dfilter pcpu ">" 20 uid ">" 1000 | dsort "cmdvect[1]"

Obviously a made up example, but something like this is easy to read and write, whereas something working on tabular ascii data would be quite long and complicated.

As per black magic, I have about the same interpretation as you. I didn't really misunderstand it to be about how complicated it was. However, "black magic" certainly has a feel of "you should not do this", and arguing that you can then use that in order to do something which could instead be simple and obvious in a typed system seems kind of weird.

First you have to handle the header specially (want it in the result but not in the comparisons).

In order to compare by uid you need numeric uids (-n), but that means you can't also get the readable username, so you need a custom output format.

Then you need to ensure the output format is such that nothing with possible spaces or control chars can end up in a column before the data you're looking at, as then finding the right column is hard.

Even then, extracting the first command line arg like in the example will fail in the case of a binary name that has a space in it (as there is no way to know which spaces in the commandline corresponds to actual spaces in the arguments or just delimiters).