It should be possible to use XSD to describe the expected in/out XML that are to act as either source or target. Currently the smooks tools requires you to have sample XML, which isn't very logical.

It's good that it's not mandatory to use XSD and that you can use a example XML to create your smooks configuration. However for most business users it's more logical to have XSD or even WSDL (if the description of the message is directly inside the WSDL) to describe how messages used by the smooks transformation can look like.