Misplaced creativity in file formats

Just finished revamping my chemistry data readers for STM4. Ang again I'm thinking about why a lot of creativity is misplaced in inventing new, similar un-parseable file formats!

Here are the formats STM4 supports for now. After the list I try to collect some of the nice (groan!) features of each of them. Why chemistry programs developers do not try to converge on a single format?

• CHGCAR - VASP format containing also volume data
• Gaussian cube - Gaussian containing also volume data
• DCD - FMD, add to PDB trajectory data
• DL_POLY - DL_POLY HISTORY file
  
• FpStudio - FullProf Suite
• Gulp - GULP input file
  
• MOL - From MDL
  
• MOL2 - From Tripos
• PDB - Protein Data Bank
• PDB-Q - An old version of PDB
• POSCAR - VASP, also as concatenated file
• SHEL-X - Shel-X crystallography program
• Siesta - Siesta
• XDATCAR - Another VASP animated format
• XYZ - The simple xyz format, animated also
• XYZ plus unit cell - idem plus a supporting file containing the unit cell

And now some of the complains:

• CHGCAR - Could contain one or two sets of volumetric data. Why should be so difficult and unreliable to find the start of the second block? And why a division of the values by the cell volume based on the file name? And why no sensible extension to the file? And no atom type in the file.
• Gaussian cube - Measurement units: Angstrom or Bohr?
• DCD - It is a binary format, so almost works
• FpStudio - Why two structures in the same file with different methods to describe symmetry? Why contains rendering options mixed with structural options?
• Gulp - It is more a human readable input format
• MOL - At least it is documented, but why uses fixed width numeric fields?
• MOL2 - Documented
• PDB - Atom numbers in fixed width fields, number of atoms limited to 99999, creativity a go-go in the atom name field (obviously without putting the element type in the appropriate field)
• PDB-Q - A column is 10 bytes shorter, so another reader is needed
• POSCAR - Simple format, but the kind of atoms is not in the file
• SHEL-X - No big problems, except understanding symmetry definitions
• Siesta - No problems
• XDATCAR - No problems
• XYZ - No problem
  
• XYZ plus unit cell - No problem

The saga continues...