The plan is to use it for general tools, automated builds, TDD and datafile conversion.
Also package management.

Pipes between multiple processes suffer from having having to write two different programs. You have to write the VDF program, the DOS program, and you've got to make sure they can talk to each other and they continue to talk to each other. That may be easy for others, but it's complexity I'd rather not deal with. Plus - I'm not hugely comfortable writing utilities in languages other than DF. That's a personal thing.

Nils - There probably is a better way of doing this. I think it's a prerequisite of me posting anything here that -
(a) someone else already did it better. (json & XML Parsers)
(b) What appears to be an amazing utility to me is actually mundane, prosaic or unnecessary. (Coffescript preprocessor)