> But can you guarantee that no information is lost by exporting?
You practically never can when exporting in any format, from any program, since few formats are subsets of any others. The important thing is to be able to export the information you need. Most formats cover the same things, so chances are you can export what you need.
FWIW, I've seen a few projects that import blend files. Serialized memory dumps are not a bad thing and are easy to write loaders for (as long as they're documented sufficiently and/or have libraries available.)
I don't see why you would need to have a separate format. As long as .blend is fully documented up to the point of being able to recover all the application-agnostic data I don't see a benefit to splitting off another format. It might make sense to omit the Blender-specific UI data and so on, but I don't think that really needs a separate format to accomplish.
> and I had bad experience with the Blender exporters in the past on this point
Bad experiences with Blender exporters will probably never cease. Many of them are written by a single person to scratch an itch and do the minimum they need from it. That isn't to say you won't find quality ones, but unless and until all formats have exporters in-tree and are dutifully maintained, there will be occasional breakage. The good news is the quality tends upward, so exporters for common formats are probably a lot less disappointing today than when you last tried them.
You practically never can when exporting in any format, from any program, since few formats are subsets of any others. The important thing is to be able to export the information you need. Most formats cover the same things, so chances are you can export what you need.
FWIW, I've seen a few projects that import blend files. Serialized memory dumps are not a bad thing and are easy to write loaders for (as long as they're documented sufficiently and/or have libraries available.)
I don't see why you would need to have a separate format. As long as .blend is fully documented up to the point of being able to recover all the application-agnostic data I don't see a benefit to splitting off another format. It might make sense to omit the Blender-specific UI data and so on, but I don't think that really needs a separate format to accomplish.
> and I had bad experience with the Blender exporters in the past on this point
Bad experiences with Blender exporters will probably never cease. Many of them are written by a single person to scratch an itch and do the minimum they need from it. That isn't to say you won't find quality ones, but unless and until all formats have exporters in-tree and are dutifully maintained, there will be occasional breakage. The good news is the quality tends upward, so exporters for common formats are probably a lot less disappointing today than when you last tried them.