How, though? I agree that jq's syntax isn't exactly the most straightforward, and it gets raised as a point of criticism anytime jq is mentioned, but its scripting language seems like a pretty good compromise between compactness and rich features.
Replacing that with, say, traditional command line flags would make it a lot less useful for me, I'd probably have to build much longer pipe-chains to do things that are relatively simple and readable jq snippets (if one knows the syntax.)
Using an established scripting language in its place would make it pretty much just python -c/ruby -e or whatever with some pre-loaded functions, but what's the point? You can always just write a quick python/ruby/whatever script, jq to me is an alternative for cases where a script feels unnecessary. It would also mean everything gets more verbose, so less of my jq transformations can be inlined without loss of readability.
Aligning it to more established languages would probably cause confusion as well in those cases where it doesn't match the reference language 1:1. Looks like javascript, writes like javascript, but only for a tiny subset of the language, etc.
Doing this only for a few function names or syntax constructs still results in a pretty unique and unusual language that will require people to reference the docs a lot, just now lots of existing scripts break.
Just because jq is very well stablished doesn't mean their APIs are well designed and we shoudn't improved because will break existing scripts.
There're a lot of quirks from the usage of it and people struggling with learning such a great tool, so in the area of query-json it will try to make a better interface for users.
