My sense is that it's not actually _bad_, but it's still pretty immature. I tried using it before the current version and ran into a lot of problems. The current version at least works, but I'd characterize it as having all the standard 1.0 type problems -- it's not terribly robust, or user friendly, or easy to incorporate into a larger solution.
I think it's going to get better by leaps and bounds, and ultimately be a great help to the problem of turning XML streams into
Java objects and vice versa. Nowadays that's still an awkward set of JAXP code.
Just my $0.02.
Ken