Resolved this on github:

.[0] as $keys |
.[1] as $values |
reduce range(0; $keys|length) as $i  ( {}; . + { ($keys[values[$i] })

This trick with the jq 1.5 inputs streaming filter seems to do it

... | jq -n '.items |= [inputs]'

Ex.

$ find ~/ -maxdepth 1 -name "D*" | 
    while read line; do 
      jq -n --arg name "$(basename "$line")" \
            --arg path "$line" \
        '{name: $name, path: $path}'
    done | jq -n '.items |= [inputs]'
{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Downloads",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Downloads"
    },
    {
      "name": "Desktop",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Desktop"
    },
    {
      "name": "Documents",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Documents"
    }
  ]
}

You can accomplish this by wrapping $n in parenthesis to tell jq to evaluate the expression:

n="foo"; echo "{}" | jq --arg n "$n" '. += { ($n): $n }'

Or probably better suited for this task would be jo(1):

$ jo "$n"="$n"
{"foo":"foo"}

I'm not sure if the documentation is just wrong or if my ability to comprehend is not at a high enough level but it does seem to say that your example should work:

Key expressions other than constant literals, identifiers, or variable references, need to be parenthesized, e.g., {("a"+"b"):59}.

And one might assume that is referring to a jq native variable rather than one injected by the shell as they are slightly different, but alas both need to be parenthesized:

$ echo '{}' | jq 'def myvar: "foo"; {myvar: myvar}'
{
  "myvar": "foo"
}
$ echo '{}' | jq 'def myvar: "foo"; {(myvar): myvar}'
{
  "foo": "foo"
}

The |= .+ part in the filter adds a new element to the existing array. You can use jq with filter like:

jq '.data.messages[3] |= . + {
      "date": "2010-01-07T19:55:99.999Z", 
      "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml", 
      "status": "OKKK", 
      "message": "metadata loaded into iRODS successfullyyyyy"
}' inputJson

To avoid using the hardcoded length value 3 and dynamically add a new element, use . | length which returns the length, which can be used as the next array index, i.e.,

jq '.data.messages[.data.messages| length] |= . + {
      "date": "2010-01-07T19:55:99.999Z", 
      "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml", 
      "status": "OKKK", 
      "message": "metadata loaded into iRODS successfullyyyyy"
}' inputJson

(or) as per peak's suggestion in the comments, using the += operator alone

jq '.data.messages += [{
     "date": "2010-01-07T19:55:99.999Z",
     "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml", 
     "status": "OKKK", 
     "message": "metadata loaded into iRODS successfullyyyyy"
}]'

which produces the output you need:

{
  "report": "1.0",
  "data": {
    "date": "2010-01-07",
    "messages": [
      {
        "date": "2010-01-07T19:58:42.949Z",
        "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml",
        "status": "OK",
        "message": "metadata loaded into iRODS successfully"
      },
      {
        "date": "2010-01-07T20:22:46.949Z",
        "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml",
        "status": "NOK",
        "message": "metadata duplicated into iRODS"
      },
      {
        "date": "2010-01-07T22:11:55.949Z",
        "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml",
        "status": "NOK",
        "message": "metadata was not validated by XSD schema"
      },
      {
        "date": "2010-01-07T19:55:99.999Z",
        "xml": "xml_samplesheet_2017_01_07_run_09.xml",
        "status": "OKKK",
        "message": "metadata loaded into iRODS successfullyyyyy"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Use jq-play to dry-run your jq-filter and optimize any way you want.

This was actually relatively straight forward:

.things | .[] | {name: .name, category: .params | .[] | select(.key=="category") | .value }

jq can deal with multiple input arrays. You can pipe the whole output of the loop to it:

for service in "$services" ; do
    curl "$service/path"
done | jq -r '.[]|[.id,.startDate,.calls]|@csv'

Note that the csv transformation can be done by @csv

One way would be to add the objects together with the .roles array and delete it after

.categories[][].resources[] |= ( 
  . + { readRole: .roles[0], writeRole: .roles[1] } | del(.roles)
)

^{jqplay demo}