I can't believe I didn't notice PHP has Anonymous Functions and Closures!

Once they have functions as first class objects, then there is a chance that it will stop sucking!

I had a chance to really play with PHPs native XML support.

It's interesting, but a little leaky in its abstraction. I had to futz around with the options to make it recognize CDATA sections, which involved passing options to libxml.

$xml = simplexml_load_file($file, 'SimpleXMLElement', LIBXML_NOCDATA);

Additionally, trying to serialize and unserialize SimpleXML objects is a dirty, hacky job. I didn't even bother trying to tackle that (though others have). In Short, native support for xml, isn't quite native inside of PHP.