Once you get used to it, it really isn't that big of a deal. The "efficient" statement is relative. Of course, you don't have to shorten names, but the larger the name, the larger the xml file. With jrockit, it isn't that big of a deal. they cleaned up the performance a ton with it. Sun, different story.
The footers issue is not BI publisher specific. The XML that JDE creates when you don't close a footer is broken. You can see that with any XML editor. So if your aftermarket tool wants to use XML input, you have the same issue. If it uses the PDF like createform does, you will have less issues.
We re-created about 100 form documents from createform to BI publisher in about 2 weeks. That allowed us to dump the createform, createemail, createfax, createform director licenses we had. We also built a custom document library to store all of the files and dumped createarchive in about 3 weeks. So we save a fair amount of cash and simplified our environment.
Plus, i would occassionaly have a createform printer drop the "merge" directory configuration at random times. Maybe once every 3-4 months when not a single person has logged into the server during that time. Losing that headache was also nice.