The basic problem with XSLT is that it is strictly inferior to equipping any general-purpose programming language with an XPath implementation and just going to

The basic problem with XSLT is that it is strictly inferior to equipping any general-purpose programming language with an XPath implementation and just going to town. Let alone giving that programming language an even half-thought-out library designed to help with such a task. Even Go, which is really not amenable to any sort of in-language DSL or syntactic sugar, is nicer to use than XSLT itself. XSLT locks you in a trunk without enough tools to do what you need. I remember using a variant of XSLT Microsoft put out back in the day that let you embed Javascript into it... but then I noticed, why not just do it in Javascript? So I did. And it was soooo much better. There are good ideas in XSLT, but they are so buried in a cascade of bad decisions and limitations and restictions and missing functionality and bizarre ways of doing things (and I mean, I speak Haskell, pure FP doesn't scare me, and they're still bizarre) that the best remedy is just to start over.