"I seem to have three options..."

IMHO you have one more: If it works - don't touch it!

"I have inherited some ... code"

I have just inherited some code too from a colleague who passed away some weeks ago.

OK, not Perl, it is Bash.

The guy needed about 3 years to write this stuff. Some thousands lines of code.

I had a kind of reflex to port the whole stuff to Perl.

I gave up. I'm not searching for the Perl or OO holy grale.

Pros: What works is OK.

Cons: I need to read the manpages of sed and awk again ;-(

I hope, this isn't too much off topic.

Regards, Karl