So let's go back to the 'introspection' part. I already brought forward that this ticket actually handles the possibility to introspect whether a channel is binary or not. Checking for "chan configure -encoding binary" is not it: Still, the channel could use -translation or -eofchar, which means that the channel is not binary.

How about adding a [chan isbinary|41900f4c4fcae34a] command, which - for the first time - gives the right answer?