Yup, its quite laborious, pretty much like using raw XML::Parser (or HTML::Parser)

Where as in Twig you'd say I only want trees out of '/foo/bar/bar' with LibXML (like XML::Parser) you have to build those trees yourself with XML::LibXML::SAX::Parser -- although, there is no reason a XML::Twig type API couldn't be built on top of XML::LibXML::SAX::Parser, its just extra work, given that Twig already exists :)