It's not about writing a parser, it's about figuring out what the content is supposed to be in the first place. With plain text you can see what's a number, what's a string, what's an expression, etc... I'd rather try to figure out how to parse "2 7 + 3 -" than see a file with

0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x2 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x7 0x1 0x1 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x3 0x1 0x2

and try to figure out what that is all about.