Still, I often refer to it as XMHell and if you speak it fast enough, only the truly wise will understand and acknowledge it with a smile and a nod.
There is no sane way that you could represent "pages of XML" in "a few lines of JSON". Maybe the point you're trying to make is that you need just a handful of key:value pairs but whatever generates your config sees fit to do incredibly deep nesting...but that would be an issue with your application, not XML.
I think you're wrong, namely because of arrays. Can you tell me how you'd represent [1, 2, 3, 4] in xml?
If you think this example is contrived, please compare the dependency sections of a clojure project.clj vs that of a Java pom.xml