Does it support Protobuf deserialization via Schema Registry? This is basically where every other tool falls apart. Kafka UI just added support very recently but kcat falls apart.
This is the drawback: you have to generate the descriptor first.
1) download the schema from schema registry: http :8081/schemas/ids/<my-id>/schema
2) generate the descriptor with the schema: protoc --include_imports --descriptor_set_out=my-descriptor.desc --proto_path=. my-schema.proto
3) use kaskade: kaskade consumer -b my-kafka:9092 -x auto.offset.reset=earliest -k string -v protobuf -t my-protobuf-topic -p descriptor=my-descriptor.desc -p value=mypackage.MyMessage
The only catch (in the protobuf case) is to generate the descriptors with protoc, but the good thing is generally we all have them, so maybe is not a big problem.
Then, the descriptors could be delivered on demand!