Perhaps we should be avoiding binary formats entirely, and store things in json instead. Yes, it's a big bigger, but I doubt that matters, compared to it being at least somewhat self-describing and nerd-readable.
That, of course, won't work for the majority of the clone-mode drivers which *have* to store a binary image of the radio to do their work. However, for a driver that is faking clone-mode behavior with a live-mode driver, storing the things we want symbolically would also be an option. But, we have the same concerns over testing rigor to make sure we don't break our own format, and we have to make sure that things are forwards and backwards compatible across chirp versions. Storing exactly what the radio stores is a good way to basically put that out of our own control.
--Dan