for comparison, the #xpath expressions I explored back in https://mastodon.social/@PypeBros/113510029378006785 when I was toying with the idea of a #blogger-dashboard take 8s to process my simplified .xml file
the current "simplify.pl" processes the raw blog data in less than 1/8th of a second ^^" .. so maybe I'll stick to regular expressions as long as I can.