For everyone's sake - both the modding community and Stardock itself - shouldn't the XML files be in a public-hosted DVCS system?
It would make merging changes from releases into Mods trivial, and would be an easy route for the community to submit patches to the XML itself. I'm particularly thinking about fixes for translations and documentation (e.g. tooltips and UI text) that the general community could easily submit and then would be idiot-simple for Stardock to merge back to the main release branch.
Similarly, it would make keeping the various Mods in sync with the latest Official release version a very low-level of effort.
The various releases can sit in a named branch, each Mod lives in its own branch, and access control to them can be rather simple.
I don't know what DVCS Stardock uses internally, but I would think that using one of the various Cloud-based Git/Mercurial/Perforce solutions would be VERY low cost and actually help Stardock's own development efforts considerably.
I mean, something like Bitbucket costs $2/user/month (where user = someone with commit access), and I know I'd be willing to pony up some cash to have an officially hosted Mod branch for myself. We might even qualify for some sort of "Community" style discount.
There's no significant IP here to protect - the XML is open and readable, so while it's technically copyrighted, having it out in the open doesn't reveal anything noteworthy, as it's all available by installing the game anyway.
Guys?