Element.text and other ElementTree Annoyances

I have a love/hate relationship with ElementTree. It generally makes processing and generating XML very easy. But, some of the design decisions feel like they were meant to frustrate, rather than help, the programmer:

• Many __str__ and __repr__ methods return near-useless strings like <Element ElementName at 7fb1d0f63e60>. Would methods that specify attributes and text/tail properties really be so difficult to define? Even "def __str__(self): return tostring(self)" would be an improvement.
• Element() cannot specify text. The Element factory only lets you specify the tag name and attributes. There is no argument you can pass to specify the text or tail. See, for example, a discussion about setting the text property. I see no point in forcing the programmer to write the extra line of code.
• Interfaces. ElementTree hides the Element class and provides a factory which returns an object which implements the _ElementInterface. There are other languages in which I can see this being a useful practice. But, python does not have sufficient language support and I find that this half-hearted attempt at abstraction simply makes the module more difficult to use. Python already provides plenty of tools to hide "magic" which don't interrupt programmer intuitions. Why not use those?