Sorry, I don't know the answer to your initial inquiry

| We already have cron jobs running on the switches that tftp the config file to a server, and I'd prefer to leverage off that.

Perhaps an easy interim adaptation would be to modify your scheduled job to tftp the latest xml or json then clean it up?

root@BB6> ...on | display xml | save /config/junos-config-latest.xml           
Wrote 139 lines of output to '/config/junos-config-latest.xml'

root@BB6> ...n | save /config/junos-config-latest.json                         
Wrote 169 lines of output to '/config/junos-config-latest.json'

root@BB6>
root@BB6> file list /config/ | grep latest
junos-config-latest.json
junos-config-latest.xml

root@BB6>

Hope you find the final solution, as the parser checks sound worth the squeeze.