I was hoping to quickly use xdebug to generate a full trace of my app, to be used for my own debugging subsystem.

But i've found that (in v2.0.5 at least) i can't get easy access to the variables being used by functions in a trace.
trace_format=0 does show them, but as the manual says; it'll be a few hours work to build functions to parse them.

It would've been so much better if trace_format=1 had 2 extra fields, 1 for parameters passed and 1 for the return value, both json strings with whitespace stripped and tabs escaped (if json_encode() doesnt do that already)