I think text editors are a bad comparison because they do something a little different. They are not linked to a specific data structure, they are linked to a particular data type. All of the examples of how diverse text editors are (Latex, csv files, log files, etc) are completely different data structures but all are stored in the same data type -- plain text. You can easily edit tree data in text files as long as they are stored in a plain text encoding. Counterpart to text editors would be hex editors, and all of the above can be done in them if the original data was stored in a binary format.

Text editors are useful because standards have evolved with them. We have standards for trees - XML and JSON for example. CSV editors are useful because there are ways to convert other table data into CSV to work with. If you just allowed a tree editor like XCode's plist editor to import other file types it would be the same situation.