My recollection of the personalities involved is that the author is absolutely not a purist. He's a pragmatist, and this was simple, understandable, and worked

My recollection of the personalities involved is that the author is absolutely not a purist. He's a pragmatist, and this was simple, understandable, and worked well enough at the time. He was doing this because he needed the functionality, not because it was the best design possible. I also think that this design was also reasonably well aligned with the internal XML capabilities of Frontier.