Focusing on ease of use instead of performance (I'm usually looking at small files) but I found jq's syntax to be really difficult, so I wrote my own teeny tiny tool in Python:

https://replit.com/@gabrielsroka/Bash#pj.py

Obviously it only does a fraction of what jq does, but it does what I need and I can expand it in a fraction of the time it would take to learn jq.

Inspired by https://docs.python.org/3/library/json.html#module-json.tool