(Arthur, have you looked at CapnProto? Same guy, fixing the problems.)
Yes, CapnProto is great, although they weren't really designed by the same person. Kenton Varda, who designed CapnProto, was in charge of Proto Buffers version 2, but the original designers of Proto Buffers, including the ability to read data containing fields unknown to the reader, preserving them, were Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat.