While I can't comment on your technical problems with Catalyst, I can comment on your view of Dancer:

And again, what's up with the scarce tutorials and such? Is Catalyst a dying framework???

At least personally, I have the same sentiment about Dancer, namely that very few people seem to be actively using Dancer, or at least, actively contributing to Dancer, or blogging about their experiences. I am using Dancer for some toy projects, and while it works for the simple things I want from it, and certainly has much less conceptual overhead than Catalyst, I too often encounter bugs within Dancer that make me wonder why nobody is aggravated at them and fixing them before me.

I have to note that I'm still using Dancer 1 and not the new, shiny version, Dancer2. Maybe the mainstream development has moved to that already.

As a potential alternative, which seems fairly feature-equivalent, have a look at Mojolicious too.

I consider both, Dancer and Mojolicious different from Catalyst as the two do not need the concept of Model to provide a start.