I only agree with you to the extend of programs/applications not having options for different output.

OTOH I so much wish that all those applications that generate (erroneous) XML should have an option to generate (correct) CSV. I *really* hate the overhead of XML tags, esp when not needed. And XML is relatively easy to get it wrong (but so are all other formats).

The *HUGE* advantage of CSV of any other format it that - for 2 dimentional tables (just rows and columns) - the overhead of the "Labels" (headers) is minimal. With (valid) XML, every field in the matrix needs to be labeled causing a huge unneeded overhead in storage. If I do a database table export of 23 million rows, I am quite sure CSV is about 5% of the size of what XML would be. This matters a lot in parsing speed (and generating speed FWIW).

The big advantage of JSON is that you can generate streams of data, as most whitespace is irrelevant, and that json_pp is able to prettify it if needed.