[toyg]

Correctly handling namespaced QNames is a requirement, not a bug. It makes things awkward at times, but that's a job for lib writers to provide decent interfaces.

I haven't used LXML in a while, but ElementTree, for example, forces you to use the QName in XPath expressions, which is technically correct but a huge pain; it would be nice if there was a ScrewNamespace option that would allow "simple" searches, although this might blow up in your face one day (when two namespaces define the same element name, and your xpath search brings up elements you didn't really want).

[raverbashing]

Actually the short name worked for the searches, the problem was reading element names from a subtree

It's not as much as dodging the requirements but rather an inconsistency in the API.