I disagree. The amount of tooling come from the combination of well-written specification and enterprise jumping on it. Also, basic XML is quite easy to grasp even for people with really limited or no technical skills, which is also a big bonus for adoption. Granted, some XML later developments indulged in the factory factory pattern, but XML got lot of underserved blame, especially when the purpose it’s to advocate another less readable format that doesn’t handle comments.
