[AnimalMuppet]

To me, verbose is a technical issue.

I mean, it's also a taste issue. The verboseness is ugly. I don't like it.

But it's a technical issue. You have to parse all of that verbosity, every time you read it, which is inefficient. If you're hand-generating it, which happens in the development process, you have to get all of that verbosity right, or it doesn't work. These days nobody hand-rolls a parser, but the interface to the parser is more clumsy than it needs to be, because it mirrors the structure of XML.