Insulating myself from XML

I have to program a Byzantine system which is an over-engineered state machine. To do this I have to draw the state machine in a tool which translates that into XML. I feel like flagellating whenever I  do this, therefore, I am considering writing an XML generator in my favourite toy language. I imagine it would allow me to conjure spirits in a more leisurely manner.

Barring petty technicalities, it should be a matter of mapping the relevant entities from the XML schema.

My questions are: Have you tried something similar? Was it worth the effort?

There are already quite a few XML parsers and generators, even for "toy" languages. Some will even generate the classes/objects for you in a comfortable manner (like using MOP to generate CLOS classes).