That kind of crapware is why I'm increasingly glad that the http specs are moving towards being completely illegible to middleware boxes.

How would http be any harder for middleware than app-layer? If both linked to libhttp.c, couldn't they each get the full parsing/reading/writing - wether proxy or server?

Being able to parse HTTP doesn't get anywhere when you can't actually get at the contents because they're encrypted (as with all major HTTP2 implementations).