1. Converting from XLS, TXT or CSV is easier to XML. In fact, Excel may have a built-in facility to export to XML.
2. The XML format is much easier to understand than Gedcom. Gedcom is old and is full of quirks, including character encoding for non-English text, line limitation to about 80 characters and some ambiguous values for tags such as NAME and DEAT. I am not bashing Gedcom, however I am just expressing my difficulties working with .ged files.
NAME
DEAT
3. The XML format is native to GenoPro, meaning you can round-trip data in XML without any data loss. Importing Gedcom to GenoPro results in some data being modified while being imported.