WS auth is horrible though and a bearer token (and tls) in the header is definitely the way to go.
No, XML is still not mature. They still need to fix the security issues everyone reimplements every time such as local file disclosure via DTDs, exploding documents due to entity expansion and so on. It basically doesn't handle untrusted input well, like SQL built from strings without parameter bindings.
I hope this is reasonable and doesn't use XML Security or similar extensions that add a whole stack of other security issues on top that everyone reimplements when adding SAML support.
Who is doing this reimplementation? You're supposed to be using mature, battle-tested libraries for parsing these formats. Writing your own parser for just about any format is a fool's errand when good implementations that have already addressed these issues exist. Even a simple format like JSON is not immune to performance, safety, and correctness pitfalls.
Using XML in a safe way requires you to study what is wrong with XML first. That is not what many people do.