people are just straight up afraid to write their own binary formats, aren't they. it's not hard, it's exactly like creating your own text format but you write binary data instead of text, and you can't read it with your eyes right away (but you can after you've looked at enough of it.) there is nothing to fear or to even worry about; just try it. look up how things like TLV work on wikipedia. you can do just about a…
If you did mean for production use, I assume you also implement your own encryption, encoding schemes and everything else?