SQLite would have been a lot better choice, in my opinion.

Pardon my ignorance about formats, but between XML & JSON, what would have made them choose XML? As I understand there is lot more tooling, standards & existing software examples around JSON for project & records management (e.g. VSCode's records as settings.json for example). Wasn't XML spearheaded by Microsoft but mostly used by Microsoft today?

> It's slow and bad.

Seems to have been working great for MS Office.