This opposition of org-mode vs. (LaTeX, SGML) XML in publishing is something that resonates very strongly with me - though I'm afraid it's hard for many org users to understand.
I do almost all of my daily work in org-mode, but whenever I start a writing project that needs to be published, I use XML. There are all kinds of reasons for this, some very specific to my case of academic writing, where the handling of citations, footnotes and bibliography can get very complex and specific. But I feel that in the end it comes down to something much simpler.
For decades I have been using docbook-xml for all my writing projects, starting with drafting in asciidoc (and this co-existence of asciidoc and org-mode as two "markdown" dialects still leaves me unsatisfied). The deeper reasons however seem to be that in org-mode you start designing your text from an outline. For me, this is the wrong approach, as I need to write a text as a stream-of-consciousness, adding paragraph after paragraph, and only later get to an outline. The way I'm used to using org-mode seems to make this impossible for me.