Comment by th0ma5

I think you're getting at a very often discussed ebb and flow between being extremely controlled vs extremely flexible. XML was astounding compared to system specific proprietary systems, and then as the need for formalism grew people wanted something simpler... And now you see the same thing growing with JSON and the need for more rigor. I personally think there are many forces to all of this, just the context at the time, prevailing senses of which things are chores and which aren't, companies trying to gain advantage, but probably most importantly is that the vast majority of people have a subset of historical information about systems and computer science, myself included, yet we have to get things done.