If XPath was the core nobody would need xslt, because pretty much every xml library can do XPath.

Don’t get me wrong, XPath is by far the best thing to come out of the xml ecosystem, but the actual idea at the core of xslt is the match/patch during traversal, and talking about it in terms of selection misses that boat entirely. Select / update is how you manipulate a tree with jQuery, or really the average xml library.

I recall seeing some libraries on github that convert back and forth between xslt and json... and another short hand version that was much clearer from Juniper I believe.