I've never understood this criticism. XML is quite simple - perhaps too simple.

If you're really offended by needing to repeat an element name in the closing tag... well... that's not exactly a serious criticism is it?

I mean, you could make various reasonable criticsms - XML sure isn't perfect. You might say the object model maps to documents, but not so well to typical programming constructs such as unordered hashes or ordered lists of unnamed items. You might complain that its data model is too simple in that it can only easily represent printable text-strings not binary data, numbers, dates etc. You might complain that namespaces are a hassle in many API's. You might complain that the distinction between attributes and elements is odd and somewhat arbitrary.

But bloated? You're just ranting.