My impression when people try to traverse XML while ignoring its namespaces is that they often don't really understand why the namespaces are there in the first

My impression when people try to traverse XML while ignoring its namespaces is that they often don't really understand why the namespaces are there in the first place, which indicates to me that they don't really understand the data they're processing, which leads me to believe that any effort they may undertake to extract specific pieces of their document is doomed from the start.