Why is my object not being instantiated?

For NetReflector to successfully create an object, there must be a public constructor that takes no parameters.
There must also be property set methods for all items (including collections) that NetReflector needs to instantiate.
Remember too that XML is case sensitive. The names of your XML elements and attributes must exactly match the name specified in the NetReflector attribute.

What are those > and < things in the One minute introduction?

The encoding of XML is such that < and > characters cannot appear inside an XML attribute. If you need those characters inside an attribute, you must use the escaped versions ( &lt; for < and &gt; for >).