"To be fair, few users ever cared about XML formats themselves: it is only when documents get scrambled or fail to open that such things become important."

How is it more likely to scramble the writing of a binary data file than a (much larger) XML text file? I also wonder how well suited XML-based formats like ODF or Microsoft's equivalent are to safe incremental updates. Structured storage has evolved to do that, but XML is very sequential and can have nested opening and closing tokens spaced widely apart in a large document. All this seems to be more about politics than technology.