To gain access to the better toolset you need v2 and v2 costs. Maybe the org doesn't have it, maybe getting a PO for it is annoying, maybe there's friction around getting it installed on a customer site. Perhaps its just a factor which resulted in everyone else sticking on 1.0. But it never took off in the way promised because of it.

That it is a fiercely declarative language makes it hard to integrate. Often developers are placed within an architecture that gives them limited options and only being able to use XSLT while trying to integrate other network calls or services is non-trivial and a complete headfuck sometimes, compared with more general purpose languages like python or javascript.

You are misinformed about license cost, as I’ve already explained in multiple comments.

Hard to integrate in what way? XSLT is a language focused on several things that it’s very good at but it’s not intended to replace Python or be a general purpose language. Yet there are many common data related tasks where a messy and hard to maintain pile of imperative code can be replaced with a simple XSLT.

I'm talking about the cost as being friction that resulted in 1.0 being so dominant and 2.0 being scarce.

Not everyone gets to pick and choose how they use XSLT. Place I used to work, the services team used to have a sign:

> [X] Days since last custom report

They hated it and I can't blame them, making a series of soap calls, consuming the most degenerate api ever written and generating a document for the customer was a pain. Bear in mind this was an enterprisey "do everything system", oversold by sales and the services team had to use XSLT to bridge the gap between customer expectation and what the salesman sold them.

What they needed was a host for a general purpose language, what they got was XSLT.

You might want to check the username of the person you arr responding to.

its just a name. They keep sealioning me anyway, as if XSLT isn't worthy of any criticism.