I'm not an authority on SGF, but I am the owner of one of the larger SGF libraries (the KGS archives, 19,599,303 games as of this moment), and author one of the more common SGF editors (CGoban 3).
Everybody wants something different from a SGF replacement. The syntax of SGF sucks, but once you write the parser your motivation to see it change drops to near zero. If it had to be replaced, I think JSON would be better than XML just because JSON is lighter and go doesn't really need the features that XML provides. I don't much care about the coordinates. I can't read "c5" or "cd" either, I always use a program to parse. In general human readability isn't something that interests me at all, when I want to see a go game on paper I use the numbered diagrams. What would make my life significantly easier would be a way to searialize comments and tag them with the author instead of one "C[]" block per node. Breaking up the C[] into comments and figuring out who originally wrote the comment is helpful in some cases on KGS, and the current system is very clumsy. Another thing that would be nice (which a few other people here have mentioned) is a way to specify a "path" through an SGF tree. The KGS lessons are actually XML files that have bits of SGF embedded in them, describing how to incrementally build the SGF tree you get at the end. The audio in the lesson files is in blocks of base64-encoded SPEEX data. The whole XML file gets put into a ZIP file, packing it down very nicely...whenever people complain about the size of XML, I don't really see the issue, it compresses so nicely that you can easily get rid of the file size problem by a couple calls to zlib or java.util.compress or whatever the equivalent for your language is. So really there are only two things that would make my life easier, but whenever I look at it, and think about all the backward compatibility issues...well, I always decide to move on to something more useful.
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