How can I edit an underlying structure of a Writer document?

I have a messy Writer document, and I would like to clean it up. Using the WYSIWYG editor is impractical because I do not see the exact structure and all properties, so I need to check direct formatting, paragraph styles and other styles, lists and tables all separately, and it is easy to overlook something.

If it was a HTML document, I would use Inspect Element in a web browser, and I could see and edit the structure to clean it up. Is something similar possible in Libreoffice Writer? Or is there a different program which allows me to edit the structure? In an extreme case, I could try to edit the XML in a text editor, but the format is complex, so all my attempts to edit the XML so far have resulted in incorrect files. Therefore, I would like something which keeps the document structurally correct while editing.

There is a feature called Spotlight which was introduced in version 7.6; this may be of some use to you.