I see this as an example of Conway's Law - you have one team thinking about a document, and one team thinking about turtle-graphics.

Probably. Maybe the turtle graphic "modem command language" already existed when SVG was designed, and was simply reused? That's the only way the spec of the SVG path element makes any sense to me. If you "think in XML" and want to specify a vector graphics format from scratch, you would use XML nodes for path elements, not string fragments.

Alexander