I considered this as well; in my opinion, not all code will be so layered as the scala code. A topic metadata response would use the same mechanism, including the [reference]s. So in reality it's not *that* far away from BNF, but I am asking about more emphasis on layout, and revealing type/size information when practical. If you like I can type out one for the response, but I haven't done it yet :)
At the end of the day, the main reason I like to see the protocol breakdown is simple: I just inspect buffers/packets to see if things look right. Be they from a debugger, or tcpdump, the packet is the packet is the packet, and having a clear way to see read the wired data matters. I come from a networking background, so perhaps I'm just biased in that way. b
