From my perspective XSLT is a horrible language. Nevertheless I use it for every of my web projects. Besides the fact that I hate the language I love the thing

From my perspective XSLT is a horrible language. Nevertheless I use it for every of my web projects. Besides the fact that I hate the language I love the thing it does: abstraction. In the backend I only have to care about the information I want to provide and for the frontent I can do whatever I want to do with this information. My largest problems are the verbosity of the language and the incomplete implementations (also xpath). Btw. I think the Excel formulas are much closer to a functional language than XSLT should ever be ;-)