What's so bad about building XML with string concatenation?

Question

In the thread What’s your favorite “programmer ignorance” pet peeve?, the following answer appears, with a large amount of upvotes:

Programmers who build XML u

Answer 1

I've always found creating an XML to be more of a chore than reading in one. I've never gotten the hang of serialization - it never seems to work for my classes - and instead of spending a week trying to get it to work, I can create an XML file using strings in a mere fraction of the time and write it out.

And then I load it in using an XMLReader tree. And if the XML file doesn't read as valid, I go back and find the problem within my saving routines and corret it. But until I get a working save/load system, I refuse to perform mission-critical work until I know my tools are solid.

I guess it comes down to programmer preference. Sure, there are different ways of doing things, for sure, but for developing/testing/researching/debugging, this would be fine. However I would also clean up my code and comment it before handing it off to another programmer.

Because regardless of the fact you're using StringBuilder or XMLNodes to save/read your file, if it is all gibberish mess, nobody is going to understand how it works.