A friend who worked for PLOS briefly described to me how they take a Word document as input for in article and have it outsourced to some folks in China to convert into an XML input, costing a tremendous amount of money and time to process a simple document. My friend's suggestion that this could easily be replaced with a script (and taking on writing that script) was met with indifference, because the existing process "worked".

There is cruft at PLOS. CEOs running a successful business produce cruft. It is worth criticizing this.