CDATA Are People Too
XmlSerialization doesn't seem to let you encode an element as CDATA no matter how silly your desires are. Which is fine, I can appreciate that this hardly ever(tm) comes up. Still the same, serializing regex expressions as CDATA is vastly more readable than entity encoding. It seems as if this bout with trying to leverage serialization to the hilt has come to a close.
In the end I went through the attribute hoops, faked namespaces, suppressed others and did it all in the theoretical name of using the framework. But cheeky mistress that she is*, it was all just wasted keystrokes. CDATA for regex patterns is a dealbreaker, so I'll just go back to all the verbose xpath traversal and explicit configuration. Duh, I should have just stuck with the simplest thing that could work.
(*Yes, the framework is a she. Duh.)