@desecho I'm not sure what you're trying to do with this one bit I won't be merging it. Probably better to discuss before you go any further.

Ok, I see what you're trying to do now.

A few serious problems:

1. There's no documented analysis of the situation and the proposed fix. Changes are initiated by proposing an enhancement (using an enhancement proposal, aka. analysis page). There's a lot to discuss and resolve before getting to work, foremost of which is the API additions/changes that will be made since those are very difficult to change once set.

2. There are not acceptance or unit tests. All successful merges include tests.

3. You're making destructive changes at the highest possible level. You shouldn't make destructive changes (unless asked for by the user) and you should make changes as locally as possible. Removing the w:hyperlink element changes the document by essentially removing all hyperlinks (and the other information they contain). It's even worse than this (relationship links are left broken, etc.), but this is enough. This makes it a non-starter.

4. You're doing this by modifying parse_xml(), which is a fundamental function used throughout the library. This incurs risk in every module that uses it, which is many. Wrong use of a broadly used function.

5. You've added an unwelcome dependency. We don't use six on this project. See the compat module to see how we take care of those things.

So perhaps you understand my reply better now. This is the wrong way to fix the issue, in a lot of ways.