Oh it's not that bad, plus it's just an on-disk serialization format. You use it like you would Python's pickle by dumping/loading from NSDictionary/NSArray.

It's ordered, typed, can be validated by schema, and just takes the format you would write naturally and removes the boilerplate because your primitive collections in plist world aren't trees they're dicts and arrays just like in JSON.

    <dict>
      <entry>
        <key>Greeting</key>
        <value type="string">Hello World</value>
      </entry>
    </dict>

    <dict>
      <key>Greeting</key>
      <string>Hello World</string>
    </dict>

It's not intended to be written by hand. It's also like 30 years old.