[klibertp]

I don't completely understand this sentiment. I mean, when confronted with "rookie devs", surely our focus should be on transforming them into not-rookie devs, not on transforming our tooling into a dumbed-down version...

Plus, while 'elegance' is mostly subjective, I see a lot of it in XPath. It's a DSL for describing generic tree traversal, its concise and declarative, and frees its users from the need of writing imperative or recursive, repetitive and easy to mess up, tree traversal code. Just not having to maintain state by hand during traversal is a huge timesaver. Additionally, at least in version 1 + some early extensions, XPath is much less complex than PCREs and not much more complex than CSS syntactically.

edit: typos