I'd rather have this file format with an incomplete reference and confusing implementation, than not have this file format at all. Parquet was such a tremendous improvement in quality of life over the prior status quo for anyone that needs to move even moderate amounts of data between systems, or anyone who cares about correctness and bug prevention when working with even the tiniest data sets. Maybe HDF5 and ORC would have filled the niche if Parquet hadn't, but I think realistically we would just be stuck with fragile CSV/TSV.