I agree with you whole-heartedly. Instead of running one simple qemu command for each vm you instead have hundreds of lines of xml split into many different fil

I agree with you whole-heartedly. Instead of running one simple qemu command for each vm you instead have hundreds of lines of xml split into many different files. Files you need to run through libvirts session manager that needs to implements its own pretty pointless state management (this could be handled by systemd instead). If there is a nice feature in qemu you want to use, not only do you need to know how to define it in libvirts xml, it might not even be supported at all.