I've had some success using Template::Plugin::XML::LibXML for parsing simple XML files. This allows me to process XML using XPath, my favourite part of XSLT, without XSLT's syntax, which I find a little verbose and fiddly. Your tastes may vary, but my point is that XSLT isn't the only templating system that can process XML documents.

It still helps if you learn XPath, which takes time, but provides a very convenient way of accessing data in tree structures.