I tend to use jq a lot. As others have said, sometimes jq can be hard to grasp. Often it requires multiple attempts to get the correct answer. To make it a little easier for me, I've written a helper function[0] that combines it with fzf[1] to run jq as a REPL on any json. It allows to incrementally alter your DSL without having to continually call jq. This is similar to jid/jiq but a little more powerful. It includes functions to change the preview to output raw, compact (or not), and some other things.
It is essentially similar to jqplay but local.
I didn't use jid/jiq because jid uses go-simplejson, which is nowhere near as powerful as jq, and jiq seemed very buggy when I used it and it felt like it was hacked together. Plus there was no where to change jq's arguments while running it.
I'm sure this function can be improved on, but this has been good enough for me so far.
Also, I run gojq[2] instead of jq. It is a drop-in replacement for jq but is written in Go, and has some improvements over jq such as bug fixes, support for yaml input, and it also provides more helpful error messages.
[0] https://github.com/hoshsadiq/dot_files/blob/master/zshrc.d/m...