All languages have XML parsers, it's more that a lot suck, they might have weird concepts you have to use, or are constantly tripping you up with namespaces, or make it really hard to write xpath queries.
You mean requires that you understand the XML format you are working with? Oh noes!
Namespaces exist, just about everywhere in the world of programming, and they do so for a reason.
<bar /> is not the same as <foo:bar /> just like http://bar.com is not the same as http://bar.foo.com.
If that's putting the bar high, I really think I may be suffering a huge disconnect from the rest of my peers in terms of expected capabilities.
Just because JSON doesn't have namespacing-capabilities at all, doesn't make it a worthless feature. It's actually what gives you the eXtensibility in XML. As a developer I expect you to understand that.
(And I wonder how long time it will take before the JS-world re-implements this XML-wheel, while again doing so with a worse implementation)
Yes, you can write code to add default namespaces when the document author didn't include them and pass in namespace maps everywhere but that's a lot of tedious boilerplate which requires regular updating as URLs change. Over time, people sour on that.
It really makes me wonder what it'd be like now if anyone had made an effort to invest in making the common XML tools more usable and other maintenance so e.g. you could actually rely on using XPath 2+.
I'm going to guess never. I'm also going to guess that there isn't a single flamewar in the entire history of JSON where someone was trying to figure out how to implement anything close to XML namespaces in JSON. And by "close", I mean something that would require changes to JSON parsers and/or downstream APIs to accommodate potentially bipartite keys.
