Frankly I don't see the point: CGI.pm's main asset is that it works, it is used all over the web and is extremely robust.

Now maybe it is convoluted inside, and it does 2 things instead of one. But it is also very cleverly written and performances don't suffer from the slight feature bloat. In any case if you want performaces you can use mod_perl, I would think that starting a Perl interpreter is what takes up time, not loading CGI.pm.

So I for one am willing to take CGI.pm as a black box, size and all, and even to use the HTML generation methods for quick forms that do not justify using a templating system.

Using a smaller module does not IMHO justify the security (and stability) risk involved in using a new module.