Okay, Craig and I are done with this topic...

Craig's last post makes me think we've have come to the same place. The way I see it, people simply can't have everything they want:

• A flexible system that can evolve
• A system that's easy to build without knowing anything about the XML layer that we're all relying on
• Code that is easy to write and hard to break

So choose your preferred approach, but understand what tradeoffs you're making (I focus on the first point, skip the second, and try to keep the third one under control). If you proceed without understanding that, you do so at your peril.