I've really delayed getting into vex, my vop knowledge is OK. I'm wondering if it's possible to parse xml data via vex/vops?

Not really.

You can slurp text into a detail attribute, and try and parse it, but its not fun, and there's no built in libraries for dealing with xml.

Python however loves all that. You're better off doing it there, creating objects/points/attribs in python, then afterwards doing all the interesting stuff in vex.