Everyone else, including myself, see it for what it is, one of the best ways to build up, iterate/change, and maintain a UI.
Nothing else even comes close.
edit: I write XAML mostly manually, not via a designer. I also don't subscribe to any particular rule-set about using or not-using code-behind, particular ways of databinding, etc.
It quickly progresses past hand editing on any project of any significant complexity. (Read: a real app) So Blend is required, especially if you're doing animations. VS is only slightly better than notepad for XAML.
XAML parsing is consistently broken in Blend and VS, so bad markup breaks the entire file without any meaningful error message. On a related note, it is very difficult to make "Blendable" XAML files. Wiring up data-binding kills blendability. You end up opening a lot of "blank" files in the designer.
MVVM is a pattern to avoid having to deal with XAML.
XAML is more of a human-readable file format than a presentation markup language. You have a lot of information about the app/state mixed in with the UI markup. You need to have a solid understanding of the C# underneath to use XAML properly.
Designers should NEVER be allowed to produce their own XAML, especially in Blend. It's worse than Frontpage. The cake is a lie. Designers still live in Photoshop and Illustrator. Programmers are actually the main users of Blend. The root problem is that you can't produce usable XAML without also knowing C# and the .NET Framework. In other words, you have to be a programmer to generate XAML in Blend. Fail.
That's like complaining about gravity or friction or taxes. Give me an example of a software tool that non-programmers can use to generate working software and I'll eat my hat.
XAML isn't working software. It's markup. UI.
For an example, I've seen designers generate great HTML+CSS (and then leave the data queries and ajax post to coders who don't have the same design sense).
Designers use tools, and they edit the resulting textual markup by hand. Because understanding that markup and having an aesthetic sense about when it "looks good", has low repetition etc is part of their skillset.
Clues come from experience. And without experience, just starting out on a subject, makes you clueless about it.
A more constructive phrasing might have been:
The majority of people that I've heard criticize XAML are people who are just starting out with it and don't fully understand what it has to offer