The syntax felt ok to me; selectors felt natural and pipes felt very conventionally shell-like. Ut man, the vocabulary, the variety of different operators you'll need to use in this circumstance or that–brutal.

There's some decent cookbooks/recipes but they're still 1/5th as big as they could be.

What do you think the trade off here with syntax is and what jq was designed for?

A bash script might need to execute it and you want something without lots of funny characters or whitespace as it's going straight in to the terminal.

That necessary terseness makes it the opposite of readable.