I strongly believe that was the right way to go. I never understood why Google didn't make a big push for standard structured information. They could have published standards for different industries similar to RSS. Everyone would have gotten on board similar to how every blog was pushing a RSS feed. Once the web moved towards structured data it would have been the first big step towards Semantic web.

Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".