On not reinventing the wheel
Had this sitting around in my 'things to think about' file for a bit now.
In the early days of the SNMP, which does use ASN.1, the same issues arose. In the end, the working group agreed that the use of ASN.1 for SNMP was axiomatic, but not because anyone thought that ASN.1 was the most efficient, or the easiest to explain, or even well liked. ASN.1 was given axiomatic status because the working group decided it was not going to spend the next three years explaining an alternative encoding scheme to the developer community.