XEmacs does most of what you want...

ADBX C-u 1 M-x add-global-abbrev RET automatically done by XEmacs. RET
WABOP C-u 1 M-x add-global-abbrev RET with a bit of programming RET

• Bracket matching: ADBX.
• Syntax highlighting: ADBX.
• FTP / SCP interface for editing remotely: FTP is ADBX; I'm not sure about SCP. It shouldn't be too hard to modify ange-ftp though; so SCP can be ADBX WABOP.
• perl -c interface: ADBX IIRC with CPerl mode; if not, easily creatable using shell-command-on-region and save-excursion, so can be ADBX WABOP.
• User settable icons: Doable IINM.
• Template facility: I'm not sure what you mean.
• URL Encoding: I think you mean HTML entity encoding. Just create a new minor mode, say, html-entity-encoded-mode, and add a hook to check for new characters needing entity-encoding. ADBX WABOP.
• Unicode capable: XE is *almost* Unicode capable. People are working on it.
• Cryption: Unfortunately not ADBX, yet, though one can invoke GPG or similar with an (M-x term)-inal.
• Perl 5 regexen: One way to do this is interface to perl itself; another way would be to rewrite XE's regex engine... can be ADBX WABOP or with a lot of programming depending on how you approach it.
• vi (or vi like) substitution ability: Blasphemy! Blasphemy! :-) Really though, (?:query-replace|isearch)(?:-regexp)? is enough for me. I'm not sure how vi handles it.
• Link to the monastery: Can open URLs. Can therefore open http://www.perlmonks.org/, either with XE/W3 or in a separate browser.
• GPL: That it is.