Converting XML to a dictionary should be easy -- and fast.
Most of the current XML to dict projects are either unmaintained, slow, or not well-tested. This shouldn't be the case.
You can either clone this repo or use pip.
pip install relaxml
>>> from relaxml import xml
>>> some_xml = open('file.xml')
>>> xml(some_xml)
{'ohai': {'xml': 'data'}}
>>> import requests as req
>>> content = req.get('http://lots.ofxml.org').text
>>> xml(content)
{'ohai': {'xml': 'data'}}