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Well, at least the underlying API is much simpler - you can do things manually if necessary. Trying to talk to WCF SOAP services from Ruby has been really painful - none of the SOAP libraries actually work with the Microsoft stuff, and it's so overcomplicated that making requests manually is a pain.

Because SOAP is an unnecessary overhead and complication. It also kills performance.

Because everybody's SOAP implementation is subtly different, leading to bugs/pain/things not working.