I think this would be a fairly easy update for the dev team. If we had the data files in XML, it would be soooo much easier to analyze them with 3rd party software.

For example, I often want to look at various things in our shard's data files, like who has the highest of skill X or who has the most money (across all banks/containers). Right now the only way to do this is with some intensive perl regex. If we had the data files in XML this would be a thousand times easier to manipulate and analyze.

I second this, it would be a lot better for those purposes, and also for backups, manually modifying data, synchronization with real database management systems (like mysql, sqlserver, posgresql, you name it), etc...

Would be awesome!

There is a PHP config file script in the Distro SVN. This can be used to load datafiles also for being parsed in PHP easily.