adamtaro
Masklinn is right: I didn't ask for a schema. I didn't ask for anything. I somehow expected well-formed XML in a directory full of .xml files. That's 90% of what the rant is about.
I wasted a handful of fscking years of my life editing a significant international standard that used a peculiar dialect of W3C XML Schema. I know from schema over-design. I'm just talking about understanding the bare basics of xml and seeing that 'excerpt:encoded' might not convey what you think it means when set next to 'content:encoded'.
And it indeed took less time to hack together a solution to extract the information I needed (yay sed!) than it did to write this quick rant. That's not the point. The point is that the hacks and work-arounds should have been unnecessary. It's passing the savings of having one careless dev on as a cost to countless others having to deal with the data downstream.
And thanks for the further reverse engineering of the likely intent of the export. I wouldn't disagree with most of the WP-centric design choices. But attempting to run through a real XML parser might've been a good choice as well. (And I note there's a fair bit of complaint on the WP forums about the difficulty of using the data for import.)