xslt is hard?
It's a programmers job to tackle complex problems and complex standards. There's stuff that is way harder and still needed. Just keep going at it and get's easier each time you need to learn new stuff.
Xslt is easy.
Really! There are good books out there that teach you xslt. Just learn e.g. rdf/owl (a w3c standard) and it can still get much more complex...
xslt is slow? Just use the right caching if you can. (ok, its not always possible...).
Just read about REST (some book or Roy Fielding dissertation) that's essential stuff too.
Now with XProc (xslt piplines) and a small restserver around calabash (Xproc implementaion) you can archive so much. it can definitly save you time. any data can be exportet to XML, made aviliable via REST and transformed with XProc.
