I came to XML for hypertext, and I'm still trying to get there. XLink/XPointer is just not that helpful, but its supporters seem pretty well convinced. Tim Bray, for instance, said:

I reviewed the XLink spec, and I thought about how I'd go about designing markup for multi-ended and out-of-band links, and I thought XLink presented a pretty compelling design for how you'd do those things.

I think disagreement should be accompanied by examples: "here's a better way to do a multi-ended/out-of-band/metadata-loaded hyperlink, and here's why it's better."

Here's phase 1 of that discussion - an initial proposal. The next phases include a more comprehensive example, a formal processing model, and an implementation.

And if that proposal seems like a lot of work to you for linking, don't worry! Micah Dubinko's been working on a much simpler set of linking constructs for in-line linking called SkunkLink. Given the chance, I think SkunkLink will take care of most common linking issues and let those of us interested in stranger stuff focus on difficult questions more cleanly.