It makes my life harder because recovery has to be manually adjusted to work with the incorrect implementation.

It also makes the owners' life harder too. older file systems are not geared for chips and thrash the storage, making them fail significantly faster, be it removable or built-in.

> Does specialized format means you don't ever need to recover from them or noticeably less?

For my context, I recover them for forensics purposes. When I wrote "specialized format" (e.g., JFFS2, YaFFs, Target, F2F2, UBIFS) I was referring storage formats geared towards chip vs disk. mobile phones tend to be very easy to recover; almost plug-and-play. They are often are hardware modules where the entire storage can be removed, and connected through common, physical connectors to recovery device.