With me, XDK was a pain in the beginning. Builds kept failing on iOS and didn't know about the provisioning profiles. But, I managed to figure it out and got the app running. But there were still some issues.
Status bar was shown, screen orientation won't lock, and most importantly performance was garbage.
And now there are plugins to fix these issues I mentioned. I'm just too comfortable with cocoon. But I might have to go back to xdk because I'm making a very big game and it's probably going to exceed the limit of 50mb that cocoon offers for the free plan.
As consumers I say we should ALWAYS demand better.