I wrote a parser for gltf files this weekend and found it extremely cumbersome to extract the information I needed to build the binary asset files. Instead of keeping the structure simple, aka flat, gltf creates a bunch of containers (scenes, nodes, accessors, buffer views, buffer, etc) with arrays of objects which contain references to other objects belonging to different containers. This makes it incredibly cumbersome to find out what buffer a mesh references because you need to traverse the nodes->mesh->accessor->buffer_view->buffer.
It got me wondering if there should be a simple flat file format that keeps all the information COLLADA and gltf scatter all over god's green earth into simple data records. The file would be a simple list of these records that loop for the number of meshes contained in the scene.
I know the above is very simplistic because you would need to account for much more data, animations for example, but if you have a simple layout then adding and more importantly parsing that data should be trivial.
There is also the issue of size but I would rather have a large file that is easy to manipulate than a tiny file that is a nightmare to code against.
Just a passing thought. Open to criticism/critiques.