Let's not confuse the separate rolls of the generated targets (saved as XML in CP and TXF in i1P) and *patch sets*. Patch sets are the files that you'd like to reorder, add/subtract from, play with in a spreadsheet etc and you can do that prior to making a CP target XML.
I was refering to CGATS files that are still industry standard
It's one standard. There are many standards. One of the challenges with CGATS is that there are so many different versions of it so it's difficult to keep up or stay compliant with one version or the other. XRGA is another excellent and very needed standard and CGATS supports embedding XRGA encoded measurements.
It's worth noting that CP supports saving your measurements in a variety of formats, including CGATS. The process I've outlined in the article I mentioned in the OP (did you read it?) talks about saving measurements in a particular CGATS format that QRT-Create-ICC can understand.
but how do you average the data if xml is so great?
Measurement data is never saved as XML. CP is a basic tool for creating targets and measuring them. i1P is the tool for averaging, and you can do so from CGATS files saved out of CP. Measure first in CP then average in i1P.
If you don't mind me saying, it's sounds like you're clinging to the old tools, struggling to understand all the new formats and are kinda freaked out by all the changes the industry is undergoing. Sounds like you've got a lot of emotion built up in all of this. Change is good but can be scary of course. The new tools offer lots of benefits to some users but aren't as mature and refined as the old tools. We are in a transition period. I believe we will soon be able to abandon the old tools as the new tools acquire more functionality and become more complete. MeasureTool won't even run on Mac OS 10.6.8 and higher so making the QTR targets available in ColorPort along with an article on using it would help ease this transition, at least for the niche grayscale profiling community.