Ah, the quotes mix up. I didn't consider that. The criteria I was using to access some of the nodes was in the form:

my $query  = "//property[color = 'Blue']/OtherProperty/text()";
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This threw me off. I switched to using the single (literal) quotes and this has helped quite a bit. However I am still curious if there are other "/text()" style path calls. (Just in case there are better ways of doing things.)

Thanks for you help.