Do we really need yet another file format?

AFAIK, they're markup languages mainly used for configuring software. (YAML stands for "Yet Another Markup Language", or so I think.) I once had an issue with my computer's OS failing to connect to WiFi and attempted to configure it using the YAML config file it used. Having read up on YAML (which seems pretty straightforward from looking at it), I ended up wasting two days (just to get a syntactically valid file) that didn't achieve the desired result (even though I followed guides/tutorials and looked at examples). I wasn't impressed. Now, if it had been in any of the formats I do understand (those mentioned), it's possible that I would have succeeded, but I can't say since I did a clean reinstall of the system (which, until that point, had been working just fine for more than half a decade). So much for "everything on a *NIX system is configurable through plaintext files, provided you know how ..."

@pbashton I see..understood some part of it.