What you're seeing is the difference between the regular init start node format and the depot runtime/init format. The depot format is designed to be shorter, while the init format is designed to be more flexible and is older. Making them the same would require making the depot format more verbose, break compatibility, or increase the XML parsing overhead in init and/or depot_deploy.
That being said, I'd like to see the formats merged together, and ideally put into a library to make it easier to support in other components. I think the trade-off would be worth it.