Everyone's got their data in XML these days. You need to read it. You've looked at the other XML APIs and they all contain miles of crud that's only necessary when parsing the most arcane documents. Wouldn't it be nice to have an easy-to-use API for the normal XML documents you deal with? That's xmltramp:
E. Berger, S. Stern, and J. Pizzorno. 17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 23), Boston, MA, USENIX Association, (July 2023)