Also the acronyms oh god the acronyms. Xsd; xml to define the xml schema! Xpath; xml to query xml! Xslt; xml to transform xml! Excuse me while I go puke.
Actually, xpath looks like this:
/Wikimedia/projects/project[@name='Wikipedia']/editions/edition/text()
That is very much not XML syntax.
I have run into that. :)
I was on the HR-XML standards committee for a brief period, and we had an XSD submission that was truly amazing. The author had a solid knowledge of XML, it was fully annotated and documented, and it would fulfill a need for the community. But it was absolutely huge - XML Spy would crash if you expanded too many nodes. I couldn't see any existing DOM style parser being able to validate a document against it.
I get what you're saying about the X-alphabet soup. And you're right - see the other comment from jerf about the hype cycle. JSON is going through it's own hype cycle at the moment and there are active projects to do many of the things you dislike about the XML ecosystem .. against JSON.