I whole heartedly agree with you. HTML/XML should die. It really is an outdated transform which unfortunately, while appropriate 20 years ago, is not appropriate for what we do these days. I do hope that someday some of the big guns like google, apple etc take on the challenge of really re-writing the web.
And, actually, I think the bigger problems are the inconsistencies in the spec and the web browser compatibility nonsense that occurs.
In other words I'd rather have a single transform that's not HTML and does not have to support all the nonsensical, historical artifacts, while easily aligning itself with functional or other language paradigm.