I used to hate doing XML in Python - ElementTree was the nicest of them 10 years ago, but it still hurt.
But last year, I discovered xmltodict[0] and since then, I don't really care - it makes doing xml (both reading and writing) no more cumbersone than using dicts, while still supporting stuff like namespaces, CDATA and friends.
I still think XML is a horrible, misguided idea - from inception, but even more so in how it is used in practice - but I no longer feel any pain interfacing with it.
Python has a very good lxml module for advanced XML processing. You can define your own classes for XML elements, so you can read an XML file and get your own classes for the underlying elements. They're somewhat limited, you can easily define methods, but the data is locked to what's in XML. You can also define your own XPath functions and XSLT extensions. Comes very handy sometimes.
I think a big problem with XML in most languages is the tooling around it. The libraries to parse/create it are not very pleasant to work with because of the immense complexity they have to deal with. If they only had to conform to a very small subset of all of XML's features and quirks, you'd have a very sane ecosystem.
But last year, I discovered xmltodict[0] and since then, I don't really care - it makes doing xml (both reading and writing) no more cumbersone than using dicts, while still supporting stuff like namespaces, CDATA and friends.
I still think XML is a horrible, misguided idea - from inception, but even more so in how it is used in practice - but I no longer feel any pain interfacing with it.
[0] https://github.com/martinblech/xmltodict