The Stack Exchange Data Dump is very large at about 22 GB. The xml file for Stack Overflow's users is around 900 MB (about 100 MB when compressed). The format of this file is something like,
<users>
<row Id="-1" Reputation="1" CreationDate="2008-07-31T00:00:00.000" DisplayName="Community" LastAccessDate="2008-08-26T00:16:53.810" WebsiteUrl="https://meta.stackexchange.com/" Location="on the server farm" AboutMe="<p>Hi, I'm not really a person.</p>

<p>I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!</p>

<p>I do things like</p>

<ul>
<li>Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention</li>
<li>Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them</li>
<li>Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted</li>
<li>Own suggested edits from anonymous users</li>
<li><a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006">Remove abandoned questions</a></li>
</ul>
" Views="649" UpVotes="102041" DownVotes="441996" AccountId="-1" />
...
...
</users>
I realize that there are user-created scripts for converting this xml to other formats, but I was wondering why it's only available in xml format in the first place? It seems like using csv instead would have generated a smaller, less verbose file...but what do I know? (Spoiler alert: not much)
This is not a feature request. I'm not asking for the data dump to be available in other formats, I just want to understand why xml was chosen as the export format.