I'm not sure if you are trolling, but you left out the actual transform. In my experience, XSLT feels optimized towards transforms, which most other languages aren't. I also dislike XSLT, but whenever I do things like this in Python, C# or C++ it tends to get more messy then my XLTS when the transforms are nontrivial.
If you know Python, my response make perfect sense, in that it's easy to transform xml string -> python tree -> new python tree -> new xml string or json string or csv string.
