Retaining element order is not and never will be a feature of XML::Simple. For some XML document types you might be able to hack it in by subclassing XML::Simple and overriding the new_hashref() method to supply a hashref tied to Tie::IxHash. That could solve the ABC case but it won't solve the ABA case.

The short answer is that if you care about element order then you should not use XML::Simple. XML::LibXML is an excellent alternative which for many use cases is really no harder to use than XML::Simple - as described in this article.