“Nothing personal, but ...” my visceral reaction to this notion is like that of Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: “da whole thing stinks like yestahday’s diapahs!”

Remember ... nothing personal.   This is a frank comment, but not intended to sting, and strictly intended as purely an engineering critique.

Yes, it’s true:   an XML file is a nested, hierarchical data structure.   But that does not mean that you should, by any means whatever, construct a procedural software construction to match it!   I encourage you, instead, to view it as a database of sorts, and to use XPath expressions to traverse it ... to query it ... and, to focus precisely on those parts of it which concern you at a particular time.

I am extremely skeptical of strategies which attempt to make, shall we say, excessive use of “modifiers” and “augmentations,” and/or which simply become too-complex in the pursuit of brevity.   Above all other considerations, I always want to know precisely what a piece of source-code does, and, if I want to change it, I do not want that change to “ripple” ... most especially in ways that I cannot readily see.

Another thing that we can always say about files, especially XML files, is that they evolve.   When (not if ...) they do, what’s going to have to happen to your clever-but-delicate contrivance, and why?   Presumably you are still asking the same questions and still doing the same things, but how much does the source-code have to change, and how pervasive is that change?