Indeed, I was agreeing that the XML ecosystem as currently constituted has all the problems necovek pointed out.

But the W3C might have made some different choices in what to prioritize—notably, identifying a common “XML: The Good Parts” profile and providing the standards infrastructure for tools to support such a thing independent of more esoteric alternatives for more specialized use cases like round-tripping data from French mainframes.

Instead they chased a variety of coherent but insufficiently practical ideas (the Semantic Web), alongside design-by-committee monsters like XHTML, XSLT (I love this one, but it’s true), and beyond.