I guess that's my point - the author is already using Qt which has so much included, but are still including two large header files in the project just to output a ~12 line XML snippet

Qt is terrible. Since a couple of years they want a login just to download the code required for a build and I really have zero desire to get a bunch of marketeers that are wondering if I'm ripe for the plucking yet just because I've decided to fix some bugs in open source code.