I'll try to address a few of your thoughts here.

• The XML Node thread ticker should provide an option to provide a flat list directly.
  That sounds reasonable. I wrote my own routine to do it based on the threaded version, and this flattening is pretty inexpensive as compared to server hits, so to me it's not a huge issue, but in the name of completeness, yes, a "thread=threaded" or "thread=flat" option might be helpful. If such an option were there, I would have used it.
• I'll look into making a RAT ticker.
  Thanks. The learning curve for my understanding your RAT code plus learning how to create an XML ticker would take me away from working on this module.
• Most of my efforts... search internal code... synchronizing the pmdev server... correct use of private message ticker...
  If there's any feature my module should have, that would help you progress in these projects let me know.
• I'm not sure if webscraping and XML parsing code should live in the same place...why...?
  Grabbing the site's XML tickers is trivial, and my module isn't really needed for that. My goal has been to take the site's XML tickers and use them to give the module's user useful datastructures. I guess I just wanted to give the module's users a solution that isolated them as much as possible from the details of the PM site implementation. Returning a datastructure instead of raw XML seemed like a good choice in that respect. But I'll listen to arguments to the contrary, and maybe add options to existing functions that would force a raw XML dump instead of the datastructure.
• XP and level info can be obtained from the User XP XML ticker...
  I think I already used the right settings to grab that info. If not, you can always pass additional paramaters into the method that grabs the XML. I'm working on enabling pass-through to URL for such situations.
• If you have issues that you need to workaround with a given ticker...
  I'll keep that in mind. For one thing, I would love it if the xml node thread ticker could be made to return titles too, perhaps with a "titles=1" option. That would make the Janitors Thread Retitler faster, since I wouldn't have to do a second hit to grab titles.