Enthusiatic people about XQuery are numerous and I remember XML Prague 2010 as mainly about XQuery. I also often read that XQuery is much easier for beginners than XSLT.
Nevertheless, there is still no XQuery cross-implementation for browsers without plug-in. This was a problem for XForms too, until products such as XSLTForms or Ubiquity XForms appeared. The no-plugin constraint implies to use what is natively implemented in browsers: Javascript, of course, but also XSLT 1.0 as proved by XSLTForms.
A first step is to consider XQuery for rendering: XQuery is, surely, very good to generate well-formed HTML from XML data.