> nushell seems to have better way of parsing the string-only outputs of other commands.

Yup. In addition to that `parse` command, Nu also has a suite of `from` commands that trivially convert other data formats to Nu tables. CSV, JSON, TOML, XML, YAML, and many more.

So if you're working with a program that can emit, say, JSON, you just do `some_external_command | from json` and boom, you've got a Nu table.