In fact, I would characterize the desire to solve a bigger problem than necessary to be an important flaw in the technical management of the project, whereas a desire to 'do the simplest thing that could possibly work' is an indication, to me anyway, of a depth of understanding of how hard it is to just get something working, and how likely it is that you'll fail.
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The excitement of having a human-readable data format (XML) overwhelmed a lot of people, many to the point that they decided (probably from having to hand- code HTML) that it should be human-writable as well. But it's not even particularly human-readable; it's probably best described as human-tolerable. If you need to delve in and investigate what's going on with your XML, you can, just like you can go look at Java byte codes, or assembly opcodes etc.. XML is easier than those things, but it certainly isn't a great way to write.
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