[lpapez]

> I speculate that sometimes the programmer is on a platform that doesn't have an easily available off-the-shelf parser/writer, or they simply don't know about it.

I bet this sounds surreal to people visiting this site, but there are really corporations out there running on software written by people who never heard of XML. Another example is a "database" implementation I have seen in a multi-billion dollar company which relied on a hierarchy of directories containing JSON files mimicking tables and rows inside a relational DB.

The particular product in question had tens of millions of dollars yearly revenue.