I'd suggest looking at this page as an indicator (https://www.joyent.com/public-cloud/pricing -- Bandwidth tab): all inbound traffic free, outbound is 12 cents/GB after the first GB, cheaper at higher tiers.
Masklinn is right: I didn't ask for a schema. I didn't ask for anything. I somehow expected well-formed XML in a directory full of .xml files. That's 90% of what the rant is about.
I wasted a handful of fscking years of my life editing a significant international standard that used a peculiar dialect of W3C XML Schema. I know from schema over-design. I'm just talking about understanding the bare basics of xml and seeing that 'excerpt:encoded' might not convey what you think it means when set next to 'content:encoded'.
And it indeed took less time to hack together a solution to extract the information I needed (yay sed!) than it did to write this quick rant. That's not the point. The point is that the hacks and work-arounds should have been unnecessary. It's passing the savings of having one careless dev on as a cost to countless others having to deal with the data downstream.
Agreed on your stipulation on Genshi and the like.
And thanks for the further reverse engineering of the likely intent of the export. I wouldn't disagree with most of the WP-centric design choices. But attempting to run through a real XML parser might've been a good choice as well. (And I note there's a fair bit of complaint on the WP forums about the difficulty of using the data for import.)