Text formats can be downright huge, however. I've worked with quite a few meshes that exceed 100s of megabytes when stored as obj, but compress down nicely in binary. What we really need is a simple binary obj file. It would be a no-brainer to develop a binary variant of obj. This would be marginally more difficult to parse, but drastically smaller. Either that or convince Autodesk, SideFX, The Foundry, Blender, and others to read in .gz'ed versions of obj files.