JAXB has been great, a real timesaver, but it\'s still really time consuming to traverse the resulting object trees; almost as bad as working directly with the DOM.
Not directly, no. However, you can use Apache Commons Jxpath, which allows you to run XPath queries across arbitrary object graphs, not just JAXB-bound ones. It can be run in "lenient" mode, which is tolerant of nulls.
Extremely handy for replacing those NPE-prone graph navigations.