Hi,
SOAP is indeed surprisingly often used still.
The problem we (and many other projects, but let's focus on us here ;), is that there's a tension between being cool and providing the tools that people need to get real work done.
As many of you probably know, places like Reddit's /r/programming and HN among others make fun of Java EE because of it having SOAP, IIOP and (remote) EJB. It not rarely makes EE the laughing stock there and it's an easy stick to beat EE with.
Of course we have to realise that people ridiculing EE may either actually not like EE, may simple not know modern EE, or may perhaps have an other agenda. It's maybe easy to brush off a comment from "someone on the Internet" in some forum as being childish, on the other hand (young) developers ARE being influenced by this, and this eventually influences the technology choices people make (it's not easy to choose a tech which gets you ridiculed, even if the tech is suitable for your problem).
Trying to be cool and dropping everything the vocal few don't like or don't understand has the problem though that there are tons of companies with real developers doing real work using these things, who likely don't visit places such as HN that often or at all, and/or don't care so much about being cool or not.
Just my 2 cents
Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms