Some of those reasons seem a bit strange to pin on a technology that from my understanding has never claimed to be good at encoding binary data or none hierarch

Some of those reasons seem a bit strange to pin on a technology that from my understanding has never claimed to be good at encoding binary data or none hierarchical data. XML is used to create custom mark-up languages for documents, so why you would put binary data in it I don’t know, surely you’re missing the point if that’s what you’re doing. Perhaps store a link to a binary file rather than encoding the binary inside the XML. As for the verboseness of it, that’s a trade-off that you consciously make when you choose to use XML, if you want to use binary data and have small files then use a binary format. You gain file size and efficiency loss, but you also get the added advantages of interoperability over hardware and software systems - which is probably the main reason you would want to use XML in the first place. As for human readability, I don’t think the creators of XML claimed it to be readable like a book, but rather a human being could look at it and see language rather than gobbledygook! It might be hard to understand when there’s loads of XML but it’s still 'readable'. Editor problems aren’t really the fault of XML either, that’s a bit like saying a song sucks because you’ve got a rubbish CD player.