[stepk]

twobob, I can't offer a pluggable replacement, I worked on an alternative parsing approach instead. The attached aloop.sh should more or less replace parse.sh with some plumbing on your part. It should be easy for you, easier than my trying to second guess some parts of parse.sh.
aloop.sh uses no external commands to parse json data. It's all pure shell. It's fast. It's here for your take. No offense taken if you turn it down.
If you want I could work on interfacing this module to downstream code, but I probably need some overall design info/documentation - I don't want to guess what you and ixtab have in mind.
File aloop.sh is the script. Instructions at top of file.
File aloop.out shows a run on my extensions folder - the list of parsed json/xml data as a set of sh variables.

P.S. helper/menu.json 411 entry has a typo, a [ instead of a {