> The biggest strength I see for XMPP is [...] XML

It's an advantage, sure, but to me the serialisation format is the least interesting thing. Others are similarly optimized too. I think the extensibility and approach to standards is far more interesting than the fact it uses angle brackets instead of braces.

Are they still sending the entire stream as an element? Thereby making dealing with that xml a lot more painful than it needs to be.

Back in the days, I had to write my own parser, existing xml parsers couldn't handle the case well.