With Java, you have several orders of magnitude more coders already, and given that Java is to programming languages as XML is to data representations, it's only natural that Java would have the good XML tools first.

ASP is a major dynamic page generation language out there, and given that XML is a good choice for representing data in back-ends, it's only natural that ASP have access to similar tools.

To be honest, I didn't realize Perl was "looked down" upon for its XML implementations. As far as I know, they're as complete and easy-to-use (perhaps easier, but that's just Perl) as any other implementation. See XML::Simple and XML::Parser. Perl isn't always the best language for the task, so perhaps some of these other tasks you're thinking about just seemed better in another language? *shrug*