Most of the OP's problem was the fact that there was no simple way to JUST INSPECT the soap messages going back and forth. You can say that is more a problem of his tools than SOAP. But then XML (and especially SOAP) is so friggin' ugly that of course toolmakers are going to want to abstract into invisibility.

That said, SOAP really is more complex than it needs to be. What makes it worse the ironic name : "SIMPLE object access protocol".