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Part of your response is accurate as to 'why' dedicated separators never became mainstream - software compatibility - but frankly 99% of csv files were/are never meant to be hand edited, simply used as a neutral file. For the later usage, dedicated separators that do not require escaping or import settings would be major improvement.

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For files not intended to be hand-edited, it doesn't really matter what delimiters you use. It's not that difficult to code up char-escaping for csv.

At Yahoo, the typical delimiters for logs and whatnot were ctrl+a, ctrl+b, etc. It was slightly nicer than CSV, but only slightly. It was mostly nicer when manually inspecting files with columns that had embedded commas (that otherwise would have been escaped). The machines don't care, and for any interesting processing you'd often end up with escaping anyway.

But csv files can also be manipulated in shell scripts, with the text being piped from one util to the next. Here it becomes important that the separators can be correctly typed and displayed.

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