> It would have been much easier to create ASN.1 tooling w/ OER/PER and for some suitable subset of ASN.1 in 2001

Just by looking at your past comments - I agree that if google reused ASN.1, we would have lived in a better world. But the sad reality now is that PB gots tons of FOSS tooling and ASN.1 barely any (is there any free embedded-grade implementation other than asn1cc?) and figuring out what features you can use without having to pledge your kidney and soul to Nokalva is a bit hard.

I tried playing with ASN.1 before settling on protobuf. Don't recall which compiler I used, but immediately figured out that apparently datetime datatype is not supported, and the generated C code was bloated mess (so is google's protobuf - but not nanopb). Protobuf, on the other hand, was quite straightforward on what is and is not supported. So us mortals who aren't google and have a hard time justifying writing serdes from scratch gotta use what's available.

> Stop spreading this idea that ASN.1 is bloated

"Bloated" might be the wrong word - but it is large and it's damn hard for someone designing a new application to figure out which part is safe to use, because most sources focus on using it for decoding existing protocols.

For sure PB is a fact of life now. A regrettable fact of life, but perhaps a lesson (that few will heed).