Great story -- thanks. I was especially struck by this piece:

... He liked it, saying the way I'd done it was "like .NET in concept" (I think this was because of the Response->Write syntax and that I'd declared a bunch of tags at the top of the script that I knew I'd use ...). He was also surprised by how clear it was to him.

This points to the importance of a notion that tends to be forgotten sometimes by truly dedicated (addicted) Perl users (including me): not only is it possible to write Perl programs so that they resemble programs written in some other language, but sometimes it is a Good Idea(tm) to do so.

We all know how cool it is (clever, intriguing, sexy, etc) to write Perl code that is highly idiomatic, tersely compact, even ethereally abstracted. But this sort of usage will pose problems for maintenance, especially in shops where Perl is only one of several available tools (and not necessarily the predominant one).