It does seem you can handle them, but we .NET people are lazy (as in, Larry Wall lazy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall ).

I agree with the poster's reply to that: "Yes I agree that this is simple and fast, but.. What I really want is a 1-D list of my own object types." I get that when using XML web services with .NET (though mostly when consumed with other .NET or similar languages !!! which goes against it being an universal data transfer language )