FreeCAD files are zip file containing XML documents. There's nothing binary in them, you can modify them by hand if you want. The main issue being that the format itself isn't standardized, so it's continuously evolving, it can't be used as an inter-exchange format. Notice that the last standard revision for STEP files does contains some tools for saving the parametric functions in the file (so the STEP boundary surface description isn't static anymore but can be parametric too). It's not made to save all the possibilities of a huge CAD toolkit, but if such a toolkit wanted to, it could map the functions in the file to its own parametric function and allow skipping a lot of work for recreating the part.
thinkmachyx|7 months ago