My problem was our own collection class, which was flagged with [DataContract]. From my point of view, this was a clean approach and it worked fine with XmlSerializer but for the WCF endpoint it was breaking and we had to remove it. XmlSerializer still works without.
Not working
[DataContract]
public class AttributeCollection : List<KeyValuePairSerializable<string, string>>
Working
public class AttributeCollection : List<KeyValuePairSerializable<string, string>>