does anybody know if any LWP or similar implement DOM

LWP::UserAgent does not provide DOM-level access.

WWW::Mechanize doesn't either, but does parse the HTML for you in order to provide methods like links(), which incidentally, does what you want.

I have a hunch that DOM parsing is cleaner than X(HT)ML parsing

"DOM" is not a manner of parsing, but a manner of access. For methods from the DOM to be able to access data from a tree of nodes, some "parser" code still has to build that tree.

It's certainly cleaner to access data using DOM (or DOM-like) methods, or selector interfaces like XPath or XQuery.

HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath builds an HTML::Tree internally and then provides XPath-like access to that tree.

(HTML parsing) sometimes not being well formed etc

If you're talking about the robustness of parsing HTML, there are many libraries that parse HTML properly even when given invalid input. It's quite orthogonal to how you access the data once you've parsed the document.

-David