That's sort of been my secret suspicion. Seriously, when a customer asks me to make some XSLT to turn a pile of XML into a bunch of spreadsheets/tables/whatever

That's sort of been my secret suspicion. Seriously, when a customer asks me to make some XSLT to turn a pile of XML into a bunch of spreadsheets/tables/whatevers, I try to sit them down and list out the many ways that are - from the standpoint of efficiency . . AND functionality . . AND "retain your sanity"-ness - superior, vastly, sometimes exponentially so. Xquery is one of those, but if the output is more complex than a read of delimited data, then your rec "Functional Language X plus Xpath" is the Way to Go. Please don't tell anyone I said this, but the hardcore XML people can be a little culty. At untold meetings, I'd walk through all the functionality that they're getting - from a staggeringly gigantic XML system, priced in millions of dollars - and demonstrate, one bullet point after another, how the same functionality is available from a few lines of Asciidoc/ReStructuredText/<insert_your_tech_here>. Then, at the end of everything, I always have to contend with the last one: "But it's not XML". To which I shrug my shoulders: I can't solve existential problems. Why is this specific technology so important? My theory is that there's some very deep and possibly poisoned incentives at work here, which I don't really want to unpack because it would make me sound nasty, but the most innocent of these is the Sisyphean drive to impose labels on the chaos of business and on natural language. I think it might be a neurosis of the industry, but I've seen it outside of aero-def-landia too. Who knows? Maybe someday I too will rue the day I ever turned from the True Faith.