" Rubyists apparently feel uneasy if something doesn't read like nice natural language."

Include me out.

With rare exception do I want to spend time trying to get something to read like English; it won't.

And I get tired of guessing which idiomatic "natural" phrasing is to be used for such things in other people's libraries.

Funny you should compare it to XML + Java, because it makes me think, "So you need to write an API. You've decided to make it read like natural English. Now you have two problems."