It's an interesting question, but I think it can be answered by pointing out just how much effort we've put into trying to build tools around other forms of information. Audio Processing, Image Processing, have all come a long way but they're nowhere near as powerful as sed/grep/awk/etc.

I agree with you though, tools like netcat, ssh, and dd are super powerful without implying any kind of formatting Text works with these by virtue of being representable as a stream of bytes.