Microsoft and others enterprise selling vendors loved the end goal back in early 2000s - the universal API solved by middleware. That's why you had Biztalk and Biztalk consultants that made more than SAP consultants (think todays crazy Salesfarce consultants that compete for gamification badges). For example you could be a small insurance company submitting to a larger underwriter, and when you work out the transactions per month you have to take $5 off each app just to pay for biztalk infrastructure and licensing. People rode that gravy train hard. I'd be surprise if any of the biztalk shit still remained though, grand goals means juice enterprise sales. Oracle had a similarly crap product that was equally slow, painful and verbose, can't recall the name. XML and it's lofty goals beyond what it was can be compared to today's ICO toxic industry, no reflection on XML itself though.
The "badges" are not won in competions, but instead watered down tutorial gold stars. Instead of targeting real programmers Salesforce built "trailhead" for John in finance who wrote some Excel macro and decided he should become a Salesforce "developer". Thats why the small percentage of us consultants who actually come from a cs background can charge so much.
I read a great article about XML that spelled out that XML isn't a "language" or protocol, it's an "alphabet". It gives you the building blocks but what you build with it but it doesn't translate from one language to another. (I guess that's what XSLT is meant to do but it's still not magic.)
I recall a Wired article from the same era. “XML means your doctor’s system can just talk to the hospital system even though they’re different!”
Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it?