I ran into this same brick wall a few months into starting with my current employer. I spent about a week battling SOAP::Lite and SOAP::WSDL (the stub builder seemed so promising!), before deciding to build my own. The most time consuming part was learning how SOAP and WSDL works; once I'd managed to parse the WSDL and chop it up into usable pieces, the rest was lots of fun to write - I went with an on-the-fly class-based solution, using Class::Struct, Tie::IxHash, Sub::Installer, LWP::UserAgent, and lots of closures.

Anyway, in the end it was maybe a week or two's worth of work so I'd imagine it wouldn't be very hard to start up a project. I'd be interested in contributing if this does go ahead.