Is there anything that returns a parse tree of an org document? A while ago I wrote some super hacky elisp to navigate around the structure of a giant org mode doc, but it was rickety and terrible and constantly breaking.

Part of this is surely that I don't know wtf I'm doing, but it seemed like there was not an underlying data structure held in memory that you could conveniently query / manipulate, but rather, most of the existing org functionality built some kind of structure each time you did an operation.

Would appreciate any pointers, code examples, tutorials that show how to effectively navigate / manipulate an org structure and have it reflected in the buffer, if there is such a thing.