Never had to learn the intimidating XML stack in depth but it seems clear that the (superficially definetely more digestible) JSON way of notating data must slowly and painfully reinvent the wheel. Reaching the same level of logical complexity (if it solves the same set of problems) seems unavoidable, no?

So if the main advantage of JSON is human readability (not a machine oriented attribute btw :-) might be possible to JSON-ify the XML stack, essentially focusing on appearances and preserving the substance (a bit like the JSON-LD approach)

In the end of the day these are frameworks for public data / metadata exchange and removing these frictions would be enormously beneficial to everybody...