I think you are right that they saw XML and did not really know what was going on.

Actually, the format makes more sense than you and GrandFather give it credit. The general field format is:

There also looks to be a date, that's marked 'd' , after the length (in field qso_date).

I'd much rather have to parse this format than something like METAR, where you have to make guesses about the fields you're processing based on their order and format.