Thanks much everyone. After (not-so-much) pondering, I have decided to --

• follow a mix of Arunbear's, dragonchild's, and weierophinney's advice. I will try once more to understand a bit more of OOP, and read some of CGI-App's source (many speak highly of the framework, so there is some "capital" to be "expended," so to say).
• Unfortunately, Damian's book will have to wait -- I have no money to buy another book -- I think I have enough in this discussion to go on forward

dragonchild, thanks for a really detailed expounding of a really detailed expounding. I really did like your "socialist" and "clannish" nomenclature -- made more sense than other pure technical stuff (frankly, words like "class" and "inheritance" leave me cold -- esp. "polymorphism" -- that one is really frigid).

Perl has benefited so much from its laissez-faire approach -- TMTOWTDI is a flag-bearing slogan. And that is good.

However, I feel, Perl is used so much in web apps, and given that CGI.pm is a part of the core, maybe it would be beneficial to have something like CGI-App and H-T also a part of the core. Python-ers talk highly of Zope, and PHP-ers speak of Zend. As far as I can see, the closest thing Perl-ers have to a standardized "framework" is mod_perl, but that is such a pain in the behind to implement because it is tied to the webserver, and requires re-jigging your scripts more often than not. It might be worthwhile to have a web-application framework be a part of the language core -- compelte with all the services, session management, etc.