By no means are you, or anyone, a failure on the point of export, or on any point for that matter. If you can write this xml parser, you can do Tinderbox export, with a little guidance.
There are no dumb questions. Just because you can’t do it now does not mean you can’t do it later? Also, if you’ve never been exposed to some of the concepts, like HTML or Markdown, there is no reason why you should expect yourself to know what to do. Output software like Word and PowerPoint have trained us to not have to look under the hood. Tinderbox give us the ability to look under the hood and at first pass what we see is unfamiliar, but by no means learnable.
Getting to the contribution stage (aka publishing stage) of what I call the 4Cs of knowledge making takes training and experience. Tinderbox is such a powerful tool that people are often afflicted with the paradox of choice. There are so many ways to publish out of Tinderbox, the method you choose all depends on both your immediate needs and context and your long-term aspirations and goals.
When thinking about how to publish your content out of Tinderbox there are a number of factors to consider, including 1) how stylized do you need the content?, 2) how often will you need to perform an operation?, 4) are you simply grabbing the $Name and $Text, or are you wanting to pull in more variables, 5) are you looking to pull and transform attributes to create new meaning through the export, 6) how much time do you have, 7) are you interested in learning more about HTML and coding, 8) is this for yourself or someone else, and so on.
I have a few trainings on export:
http://forum.eastgate.com/t/tinderbox-training-video-20-working-with-export-templates-part-3/4075/2
I’ve also started to contribute some templates.
You most certainly got this! I’ll be working on creating more videos on this topic.