Huh I didn't know rq dropped its own query language support. That's kind of disappointing tbh, because I just really want to have one tool that's as powerful as jq and understands all the json-y formats.
That said I also don't really want the thing that does that to reinvent the wheel, jq's syntax may be annoying but at this point it's "won" really and "different query language + all the formats" is just an awkward niche to fill.
I switched to dasel a while back. Not as powerful, but I tend to use node when I want to do anything complicated with JSON querying. I spend too much time rereading the jq manual to do anything non-trivial.