It is not weird at all if you think of it from an implementation perspective: it is much easier and simpler to write an XML parser than it is to write a loader

It is not weird at all if you think of it from an implementation perspective: it is much easier and simpler to write an XML parser than it is to write a loader for SQLite databases, even if you do not write an SQL parser for it. After all there are way more independent XML parsers implemented in a variety of programming languages than there are SQLite implementations :-P.