OMG, yes, very well put. When I get a bug report with a pcap file I'm happy because I know I'll be able to see exactly what happened.
Speaking of which: for one of my libraries, I want to make a diagnostic tool that replays an interaction. My library mostly operates at the TCP level (also some UDP), so I need to reconstruct the TCP flows in my tool to feed to my library. Either I need an easy-to-use Rust library to do that directly from pcap files [1] or some format that represents bytes moving over the flow (like sets of lines with a timestamp, flow id, and pretty hexdump of the bytes) with a tool that produces it from pcap. This seems like something that should exist? Wireshark's "Analyze > Follow > TCP Stream"’s "Save As…", "entire stream", "hex dump" is kind of what I want, but it doesn't have timestamps, and it doesn't have a way to put everything (multiple flows, UDP packets also) in one file. Seems like there should be something under "Export Packet Dissections" [2] but I haven't found quite the right thing there either.
[1] https://crates.io/crates/pnet looks promising but it wasn't as obvious as I hoped how to plug it in for what I want.
[2] https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/ChIOExportS...