I'm having a bit of a tough time parsing the metadata output.

According to #22, it's formatted in "GVariant", which is rather obscure and lacks many utilities to assist with parsing it.

It seems a more standard format like JSON would make more sense.

Adding a flag like --output=FORMAT where FORMAT is one of json, gvariant, etc. and keeping gvariant as the default would ensure this change wouldn't break any existing dependent code.