Wow, the clipboard is really a thought-provoking comparison. I'm not sure if many people are quite aware of what you said, unless they've done desktop programming: when an application puts something on the clipboard, it can put multiple formats, so that when something else wants to retrieve it, it can use whichever format it prefers. This is how you get such good copy/paste interoperability between programs.

What if pipes worked the same way? What if we added stdout++, stderr++, and stdin++, and when you write to stdout/err++, you can say which format you're writing to, and you can write as many formats as you like. And then you can query stdin++ for which formats are available, and read whichever you like. And if stdin++ is empty, you could even automatically offer it with a single "text" format, that is just stdin(legacy).

The appeal of the Unix text-based approach is a kind of "worse is better". It is so simple and easy, compared to Powershell. The clipboard idea seems like it has a similarly low barrier to entry, and is even kind of backwards-compatible. It seems like something you could add gradually to existing tools, which would solve the marketplace-like chicken-and-egg problem.

You could even start to add new bash syntax, e.g. `structify my.log || filter ip_addr || sort response_size`. (Too bad that `||` already means something else....) Someone should write a thesis about this! :-)