[kccqzy]

That is actually a good approach that I have also used a lot: let the parsing library handle everything including the serialization and deserialization. But if you do that, why do you care that behind the scenes it is using JSON or XML or protobuf or something else?

[ExoticPearTree]

Because at some point you have to debug stuff. And JSON is easier to read than XML to figure out where a problem might be.