Interesting. That makes sense. Thanks for the info, Jake!
Just saw a video on why this is by Douglass Crockford.... Technically, you can use unquoted labels ala {var1:"value1"}, but JavaScript will have errors when you try to use reserved words like "for" and "switch". Rather than write the JSON standard for labels using: Attribute names can be unquoted as long as they are not these words: for, which, ... Crockford decided to just require that labels in object literals must always be quoted.