Sorry to disappoint, but I don't really consider myself a computer scientist. My degree was EE with a focus on communications. I then spent a five years shuffling bits between custom protocols for unmanned vehicles.
The data format isn't hard. It doesn't particularly impress me that asn.1 has worked for 20 years when I've seen hand-rolled formats do the same. The hard part of the process is defining the actual messages anyway.
The part that is valuable is the library and the tooling that makes efficient serialization easy. If it's not easy, it's not useful because I already know how to do it the hard way.
The marketing has a point, by the way. It's an indication that there are people who are willing to put in effort to get others to adopt their tooling. That's a good indication that when I have a problem, that there will be somebody else who's willing to put in effort to help me. Given that I have zero budget to pay for support, that's important.
Thanks for the link, though. There's definitely some useful information there.