generating refentries (refentry) from something simpler?

As part of writing a reference manual, I've written a couple of 
refentries and checked the HTML they generate.  As I'm using
them, there is a lot of boilerplate markup in the refentry XML.

I am considering creating a simpler XML alternative to
refentry and using XSLT to generate the proper refentries
before DocBook processing.  Is this a reasonable approach?
Should I do this with Customization Layers or something else?

Thanks,
-troy


refentry2 ::=
(title, purpose, contentmodel, attr?, desc, processing?,
parents, kids?, seealso?, examples?)