epage, thank you for the response. I see what you are saying but I also believe that a simple "search and replace" kind of mentality would be built into a simple command. Something along the lines of:

ElementTree.updateNode('blah', 'new blah')

Otherwise, how would one recommend going about a file based find and replace command? So, open file X, replace the occurrence of "<somefield>blah</somefield>", overwrite the file. In other words, treat the .xml file as just a text file, update it in that mentality.