I also would be interested in a slick way of slurping this in without having to use some generic heavy-duty perl parser module.

Slurp::MindReader might be a good choice.

Numerical entries can be written as-is, while string entries are enclosed in single quotes. Single quotes within a string can be escaped with a backslash. Commas and parenthesis are treated as string characters when within a quoted string...Has anyone (parsed similar formats) before?

The format is called CSV. See Text::CSV_XS.