> However, some things never stick in my head, nor my fingers, and I have to google them every time. jq is one of these.

However powerful jq may be, the comment above, which has exactly been my experience with jq, summarizes quite nicely the biggest hurdle with this tool.

99% of my jq use looks like this:

     cat file.json | jq . | <regular list of unix filters>

and the remaining 1% is straight cut and paste from google / stackoverflow that may or may not end up doing what I want.

jq's DSL is inscrutable