Well, yeah, true.
I believe it's mostly implementation and popularisation problems.
The w3c specs surrounding xml/xpath/xslt/rdf and etc are very well designed but it's possible to appreciate them only after you spend ridiculously unreasonable amount of time reading and putting them all together. Otherwise it looks like a stupid pile of complexity with no purpose.
And what upsets me the most is the lack of really good libraries, everything I worked with just sucks so much.
I still have a hope that maybe in 5-15 years things will change.