it is rather annoying to run into the limits of your tool before you run into the limits of your project.

Yes it is. I'm currently in the planing phase on how to rewrite my big projects XML config parser. Which, incidently, is XML::Simple based. While it works quite nicely, it takes some, uh, not-so-nice workaround thinking when writing the config files itself. I must admit, when i started this project, it was the first time i used XML for configuration files. And it was Plug-and-Play, really and saved me quite some time to get started.

Still, i'll probably keep XML::Simple around for all those small convert-this-into-that tools. For the typical ten-settings-and-five-comments config files for these kind of tools it is just ideal.

So, XML::Simple is a two sided sword. It highly depends on your requirements.

BREW /very/strong/coffee HTTP/1.1
Host: goodmorning.example.com

418 I'm a teapot