You raise a few good points, but I don't agree with all of them.
You're right that XML is a given for working with Cocoon. That's not a bad thing. But people already need to know a lot more than just XML in order to understand a sitemap. There seems to be a cutoff point in the development of a cocoon site. Up to the cutoff, the pipelines stay fairly straightforward: generator, a few transforms, and a serializer; after the cutoff it becomes necessary to start adding more complex behaviour: actions, nested matchers, etc. I suspect these latter sorts of pipeline could be expressed much more clearly using a scripting language.
You mention people generally have a background which includes JavaScript because it's hard to avoid learning it. If that's the case, perhaps those people wouldn't be so fazed by seeing a scripting language in the sitemap.
Really it's about using the most suitable representation for the task at hand. A scripting language feels like overkill for simple pipelines, but the XML syntax is very awkward for more complicated ones. The appropriate choice comes down to how soon you feel that cutoff occurs, for the kind of sites you develop.
Vil.
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