Most of your points are environment specific and I think that you forgot the strongest of them - "xml APIs usually suck". In .net they are non-issues.
And about being cumbersome and verbose, the point I tried to make is that you don't have to be zealous and put every small piece of data in a separate element. No reason not to put data in attributes or even in comma/whitespace separated strings, if that piece of data can be extracted in one short line of code.
How so? .Net can't magically discover the types of values or prevent developers from abusing the format.
you don't have to be
zealous and put every small piece
of data in a separate element.
But then you're layering a complex format with a custom application-specific parser, with an unknown syntax (e.g. spaces vs commas, are ranges supported, etc). It obviously can be done, but it's a mess.
