This specification is a question for the survey research producing and consuming community. Undoubtedly the answer is no, and the feedback and subsequent iterations and proposals by members of the community are what make this an open standard. It has implications of the proposals being an imperative rather than something that is agreed to by all members of the community. But it is an agreement and not an attempt to force anyone to use this specification. Survey research, the software involved and the output produced has long been the domain of competing, proprietary standards.
Tabulations are the start of a process rather than an endpoint.
The information contained in the tables will be used and transformed for use in presentations, graphics and written documents. Being able to easily extract information from a table for use somewhere else is becoming increasing important. There is also the fact that the comparison of multiple tables is, in itself, an increasingly common process of analysis. There are many different pieces of software used to work on tables, and exchanging information between them is often not easy. Some knowledge of XML is necessary to understand this document.