At this point you might as well go with base 10 and have human readability as a side bonus.
How often does a human need to "process" the data, vs. a computer? I realise the environment is a little different with today's HLL programmers, but when you do need to, it's not as if reading hexdumps is all that hard either (unless it's something like ASN.1 PER, in which case you'll likely be using a tool to assist anyway.)
I've worked with many systems using custom binary protocols, and everyone on those teams pretty much knew how to read and write them directly from the hexdump. From that perspective, I'd say text-based formats are an unnecessary overhead for all use cases except those where (non-developer) humans are expected to manipulate the format directly and often. Another memorable quote I remember from a coworker when we had a similar discussion (long ago): "text can be ASCII or EBCDIC or whatever other crazy character set someone decides to use. A bit is a bit. 1 and 0 are unambiguous."
How often does a human need to "process" the data, vs. a computer? I realise the environment is a little different with today's HLL programmers, but when you do need to, it's not as if reading hexdumps is all that hard either (unless it's something like ASN.1 PER, in which case you'll likely be using a tool to assist anyway.)
I've worked with many systems using custom binary protocols, and everyone on those teams pretty much knew how to read and write them directly from the hexdump. From that perspective, I'd say text-based formats are an unnecessary overhead for all use cases except those where (non-developer) humans are expected to manipulate the format directly and often. Another memorable quote I remember from a coworker when we had a similar discussion (long ago): "text can be ASCII or EBCDIC or whatever other crazy character set someone decides to use. A bit is a bit. 1 and 0 are unambiguous."