Couldn't someone come up with a relatively sane schema for storing the same information that a PSD would contain in a SQLite database?
That way, you could standardize on the semantics that are already documented and familiar to other developers, but avoid the difficulties of the file format, which seem to be the issue here.
* disclaimer: I've never had to write a PSD-parser, I'm just going on hearsay.
Photoshop layers have all the nastiness of threaded comments plus the added complexity of "blending". I frankly can't comprehend the complexity of modeling Photoshop's layers as SQL tables.
Converting PSD's to JSON seems like a reasonable thing to do, but converting them to normalized SQL seems like a never ending shit show.
That way, you could standardize on the semantics that are already documented and familiar to other developers, but avoid the difficulties of the file format, which seem to be the issue here.
* disclaimer: I've never had to write a PSD-parser, I'm just going on hearsay.