Technically XML::Simple operates as a kind of (if not actually) a DOM parser (evidentally with some SAX or SAX-like options if you want those) -- but I agree with you. It's canon that parsing XML with regexes is a path to destruction.

Perhaps the OP has severe memory concerns (i.e. over bloated giant XML file)? If so, writing a SAX parser only to remove pieces of XML would be painful and DOM would not be a good choice. Yet line-oriented parsing isn't going to work with XML anyway, so you are slurping -- hence memory issues again. Yep, it would be best to pick one of the other (DOM-ish or SAX-ish), despite the tradeoffs. Maintaining Yet-Another-XML-Manipulator would be quite painful. If the file is small by machine standards, absolutely, XML::Simple is the easiest way to go. Do it, and you can still think mostly in Perl!