I've been living in vd for the last few months for data analysis. It's been beyond helpful, including for examining ugly nested JSON data. It's been extremely valuable for feature exploration in my dataset.
You can also use the pyobj-cell "z^Y" command to explore single cell as a table. A single cell can be a whole nested part of your JSON data.
Also, the transpose "t" command is useful when working with JSON that is an object with a lot of keys.