I think the use cases are different between streaming and requesting n most recent logs. I think it makes sense that the streaming API just outputs the raw text, because most of the time it is just outputing to a text console. But in the case of the recent logs, I don't want to have to make the client aware of the various different log formats. Ideally the caller can be unaware of whether the application is node.js or .net based. Also keep in mind that the client can be another server, in which case its better for the extra processing burden to be placed on the user's compute, which is the case if kudu does the processing.