The "point" of SOAP is to have an autogenerated API layer + objects on client and server side.

The problem is that this does not actually help much in validating data sent or received. In addition, the client side SoapFooData you might receive is unlikely to be something that you want to pass around, so you still need wrappers for most complex structures.

Working with SOAP is complex even for extremely simple APIs, and for complex ones you will end up NOT using the generated objects anyway.

Finally implementations are generally buggy and incompatible with each other. And generated code is something that should be strongly avoided.

So in short: SOAP is complex and in return you get something that's pretty much useless (generated objects)