I think what you describe is basically that aXML is a templating module. Writing your own templating module is some kind of rite of passage in the Perl community - almost everybody at one time wrote their own templating system. In so far there is nothing wrong with you writing your own templating system.

I think what would help most people here to judge the value of aXML over the other templating systems is where its advantages and disadvantages lie, compared to the other templating systems. The four major templating systems/languages used in Perl are:

• Template Toolkit - it has its own language and can be used to create any kind of output, be it XML, HTML or plain text
• HTML::Template - it has no language and can mostly be used to generate XML/HTML
• Petal - this is a Perl implementation of the TAL language. It can only create XML and requires its input files to be valid XML too
• XSLT - this is the most ugly of templating languages because like Petal it requires its input and output to be valid XML but it lacks many of the shortcuts that Petal provides. The most likely XSLT processor in Perl is XML::LibXSLT.

Of course, comparing your module requires you to learn a bit about all the existing solutions, but it is no fault to know more than one tool for a task, because all tools differ in some points.