The Carlson .CRD format has been around for a long time and it is fairly well documented.
The .CRDB format was released around version 5.04, but really become dependable and useful with the release of 5.06 in August 2017. The ‘new’ .CRDB format expands the size of the point name from 9-characters and the size of the point description from 31-characters to 255 characters each.
If you change the extension of the .CRDB file from .CRDB to .SQLite, then you can use any standard SQLite client (like ‘DB Browser’: https://sqlitebrowser.org/dl/#windows ) to view the structure:
and the contents:
I am not sure if point names longer than 9 characters are a good thing and I personally have preferred 4-character point names in the range 0000 to 9999 for years, but I guess I understand STK1024, but extending the descriptions to 255 characters is certainly welcome.
There are also a lot of open source SQLite clients that make reading, writing, sorting, searching, record deletion, db compressing and cleaning for SQLite files very dependable and fast.
I don’t think there any disadvantages to making .CRDB files other than very old versions of SurvCE won’t be able to open them and many 3rd party tools are not .CRDB aware.
iG GPS 
As you show above, it’s very easy top open crdb files with DB Browser. For my usage, I ‘d rather associate crdb files with this software than changing the extension.
In fact, I hope some of the multiples text files as VTT and NOT ones will be merged inside the SQLite….
I believe that the next major version of SurvCE (7) will have a transition to a ‘single survey’ file. So for a while there will be both existing files and the single file, but perhaps in the future there will only be one file.
A similar change was made to Survey Pro a long time ago, but the implementation was never complete. Every new version had another fix and a new, non-backward compatible file version. Let’s hope that Carlson’s rumored path is not so rocky.
Thanks for these clues…
Maybe we’ll learn a little more about this path tomorrow, with the 7.0 webinar.