Yes that's exactly what I meant, the MsgPack documents had quite a detailed structure.

torepr didn't quite work for me as I was dealing with objects containing large binary blobs and it was awkward.

fq is a great tool and I shouldn't have suggested this was a problem unique to it! I think this kind of "issue" is inevitable when dealing with so many types of input. And to be honest I struggle hard using jq as well for anything other than very basic paths, due to infrequent usage.