If have to use a dedicated tabular data editing program, I may as well use a spreadsheet application. What do the options you propose do better than libreoffice calc?
is pretty nice because you can inspect a file or dataset on a server (no X) before downloading, to see if you even want to bother. Or you can pass it along through a series of pipes to just get the rows you want.
There is at least a chance that the text fields will fit in a tab. If not, a tool like “column” on Linux can be used. There is no chance that a text field will fit inside the width of a comma.
