It was sincere, but I'll readily admit that the opinion was informed by a 15-year-younger me who definitely was not trying to parse larger-than-memory XML files

It was sincere, but I'll readily admit that the opinion was informed by a 15-year-younger me who definitely was not trying to parse larger-than-memory XML files. I bet it was just a matter of the wrong tool for the job, but I (with some weird fondness, I might add), remember finding it extremely overengineered, even for Java standards.