deformerWeights in Maya 2016 SP6?

I have spent an entire day trying to get deformerWeights working.

Can anyone take a sec to just verify for me that in the most basic sense, the actual python example code that ships with Maya 2016 does not run.

I have written a wrapper that tries to make this feature usable, but things like passing it a string of deformers, says expected string? Their example clearly shows a list:

# Export multiple deformers
#
cmds.deformerWeights("filename.xml", ex=True, deformer=["cluster1", "cluster3"])
# TypeError: Invalid arguments for flag 'deformer'.  Expected string, got [ str, str ] # 

So I tested this in 2017. It seems to work… this is a shame, I have been trying to use this nonsense since 2014… it looked like it finally worked. Not enough of a reason to upgrade an entire department. ¬.¬