I appreciate your frank response dragonchild. This is obviously something I need to bring up to my client, so what is the recommended course of action as far as telling my client they need to hire someone with those skill sets as well?

Also, what do you mean by break it down into "week long chunks"? And how do you feel about using a pre-existing software package and modifying it? I had been thinking about nearly copying and pasting the logic into a Catalyst application and modifying it from there, because i KNOW how to set up Catalyst with FastCGI and use DBIx::Class with it, and I KNOW Catalyst can handle the load.

Once again, I really appreciate the matter of fact advice