As a meta-topic, the standard formats for geospatial are virtually all deeply suboptimal to the point of being arguably broken for modern large-scale geospatial analysis. What we have is a giant collection of narrow solutions to narrow problems, none of which efficiently interoperate with each other. It hasn’t modernized much at all, the tool chain is basically the same tech we had 25 years ago with a fresh coat of paint.<p>Fixing this is a difficult and extremely deep engineering and computer science problem, which is why there has been so little progress. Most improvements have been driven by users, but they aren’t able to make the investments to fix the problems underneath their problem, they have other work to do. Any fundamental improvements would materially break existing workflows, so adoption would be slow at best.<p>The entire spatial domain is stuck in a deep local minima.