Ohh my god thank you. I could NOT for the life of me think of another way to model data in a structured way without getting into either actual databases or just making up some kind of hacked-up class-only markup. 

I still am having trouble with the whole hierarchy thing. You can't really fully explain a hierarchy in a spreadsheet, unless you... come up with some way. The reason I went with JSON is "grouped key-value pairs", which is pretty important to the concept of data modeling IMHO. 

Basically, there's 3 parts I have to hit. What to record, and the structure of that recording, and their relationships.