people are won over to XSLT once they have a chance to get some perspective, and this usually doesn't take long at all. I have had much occasion working with developers who curse and splutter all the time at all the little tripping points of XSLT that Mike Kay points out. But at least twice, I remember a developer saying, after a few days of this, something to the effect of "wow, XSLT is certainly a different way of thinking, but I must say that I accomplished my XML processing task using XSLT in a fraction of the time it took for me to do the same with DOM and Java".
--Uche Ogbuji on the xml-dev mailing list, Mon, 25 Mar 2002