I agree with @lazedo -- this should be a modparam if you prefer to use a different separator. There are some modules using `|` in some of their columns (iirc, drouting), but at the end any character can appear in the values and they must be escaped.
I understand that one could prefer a different separator to make it more convenient to work directly with the dbtext files, but this has to be configurable and still have `:` as default separator because there are many deployments out there using existing separator.