The "Simple" in many module names has two meanings:

1. The author picked what they think are common cases, or a simple subset of the overall use cases, to support
2. A simplified API.

Since you don't fall into the simple requirements, you need to use a module with more flexibility. The downside to flexibility is that figuring out which API to call with which parameters usually becomes more difficult.

Personally, the first time I had to do XML manipulation, I chose XML::Twig and haven't looked back. In that project, I had a base XML file to work from, and then I had to pull in data from other (non-XML) sources, manipulate those, and then enter them into the base XML file. XML::Twig worked wonderfully for this. My coworkers, not being perl programmers, were duly impressed by the speed not only of the implementation, but of the result. Not hugely impressed - they've come to expect this type of stuff from me working in perl ;-) - but still impressed. :-)

(Oh, and the support from the author of XML::Twig has been pretty impressive on its own ;-})