"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.
To be fair - J2EE (and its associated technologies like SOAP, XML) is a bit like alcohol. It is great when used in moderation, but gives you headaches when used excessively.
XML is great - if you don't believe it, then you might be interested in the pains of parsing JSON: http://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html
And don't get me started on YAML...