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Quite often it just doesn't matter that much. It's a matter of 'taste', as are so many things that are 'designed'. And yes you'll make mistakes a few times. The correct response to those mistakes is to take them as learning opportunities and not dwell on them, instead of blaming and trying to replace the tools.

Of course one can use this exact argument to stave off any change ever...

Mag property is mostly for metadata, but it does not stop it to use it for this purpose. All three options are valid and you can use as will, xml is flexible enough in this point (unless your xml consumer has some restriction, then follow the consumer spec)

First, consider whether someone will ever want to convert to JSON. If so, make that easy.

it's sad that this is downvoted, since it's also true. For example, AWS emits its response as XML, and it's a chore for boto to convert that to a json response. If you don't want to use boto (say you're not in python) and you prefer getting the response in json, you might be out of luck.