I think you mean Tree mode, not Table mode. (There's also an "Object" mode that returns a tree of Perl objects, named based on the element names.)

The only bad thing about Tree mode is that the resultant data structure is rather difficult to understand, in my opinion. It's certainly not going to give you a nice hash to play around with. :) But if you feel like figuring out how the tree is structured, that may be your best option.

There are some other modules that use tree representations: XML::Grove, XML::Twig, and XML::DOM. These are all discussed in that article I posted before.