2¢ worth: use XML::LibXML instead. You can validate against a DTD which describes the required elements/attributes/structure and it's already object oriented.

You can use Moose to wrap up a LibXML object too letting it handle the XML stuff only and doing your dispatch data handling with your own object stuff. Moose isn't trivial to jump into but it's very powerful and many projects that seem straightforward up front end up being much more complex and if you bake in a simplistic approach and it ends up growing complex you'll regret it.