I should also mention, we didn't want to invent a brand-new diff format that required all-new tooling (a replacement for GNU patch, for instance). We want this to be able to work with existing tools that understand Unified Diffs and respect the garbage areas (as most do).

There are a lot of alternative approaches to how one might generate a diff (see VCDIFF for binary files), and much that's worth thinking about for generating diff-like formats that are not line-based. But this is not meant to be those. It is meant to be able to incorporate those as time goes on (as it does with VCDIFF today).