If you need fields, then separate them with a text delimiter, if you need something more complicated, then maybe you should be using a programming language, or piping between scripts in a language with good text serialization.
Given the power of any computer (even those 30 years old), it's enormously powerful to be able to drop one segment of a pipe-chain and look at the output. Funny that I'm facing a similar issue now that some of the server world is going Javascript: "console.log(X);" doesn't necessarily tell you the whole story about X. Exchanging objects is 14% too complicated and anything more than 0% too complicated is too complicated.
But having more complex objects instead of text doesn't stop us from having that. The objects just need to have some kind of to-string method that the shell uses.
If we define simplicity as: a plain text interchange format, then clearly by definition a text based shell is simpler.
Piping objects instead of text allows a single command to do more, as it can operate on any of the object's properties that it understands. From a user's perspective, I believe, that this is simpler - however I will acknowledge that this is somewhat subjective. For example: The command ls | sort LastWriteTime would print a list of files sorted by their LastWriteTime. The command ls | sort Length would print a list of files sorted by their size. Doing this in bash is more difficult as it requires additional commands to parse the output of ls.
It's not simple, it's primitive rounded in the corner.
If all you have is raw blobs of data in pipes, you can't grow up when you suddenly realize need for something more complex.
See the story with adding UTF-8 BOM support before #! in Linux kernel.