Without delving into ancient history INI support is an early feature when KiXtart was a simple login scripting language.

COM automation has developed in later version of KiXtart as it has progressed - it wasn't available in early versions.

It is not that XML support has no value per se, it is simply that building XML support into KiXtart has little added value at the expense of making KiXtart bigger, slower and more difficult to maintain. IMO simply adding API wrappers to KiXtart is just not a very good reason.

Suggestions here get debated by the community and distilled to something which is in a form that can be put forward to Ruud. This peer review process is vital to ensure that the request is beneficial to the community as a whole and is at it's clearest and most concise - the more noise there is around a suggestion the more likely it is to be heard