Standards (whether official or de facto) often aren't the best in isolation, but they're the best in reality because they're widely used.
Imagine you want to replace CSV for this purpose. From a purely technical view, this makes total sense. So you investigate, come up with a better standard, make sure it has all the capabilities everyone needs from the existing stuff, write a reference implementation, and go off to get it adopted.
First place you talk to asks you two questions: "Which of my partner institutions accept this?" "What are the practical benefits of switching to this?"
Your answer to the first is going to be "none of them" and the answer to the second is going to be vague hand-wavey stuff around maintainability and making programmers happier, with maybe a little bit of "this properly handles it when your clients' names have accent marks."
Next place asks the same questions, and since the first place wasn't interested, you have the same answers....
Replacing existing standards that are Good Enough is really, really hard.
Imagine you want to replace CSV for this purpose. From a purely technical view, this makes total sense. So you investigate, come up with a better standard, make sure it has all the capabilities everyone needs from the existing stuff, write a reference implementation, and go off to get it adopted.
First place you talk to asks you two questions: "Which of my partner institutions accept this?" "What are the practical benefits of switching to this?"
Your answer to the first is going to be "none of them" and the answer to the second is going to be vague hand-wavey stuff around maintainability and making programmers happier, with maybe a little bit of "this properly handles it when your clients' names have accent marks."
Next place asks the same questions, and since the first place wasn't interested, you have the same answers....
Replacing existing standards that are Good Enough is really, really hard.