I lived and breathed XSLT back in the day for 3 projects over 2 years. Hell, I was the company's "XML evangelist" and spoke at XMLConf in San Diego.

I would never go back.

XSLT's "coding UX" is atrocious. Simple things "look complex" and complex things "look obfuscated".

As mentioned in the parent post, there's also this consistent "low leverage" to the code so you feel as if you're typing a lot for little impact.