I recently was wading through something like 8k worth of digital photos, looking for duplicates and doing other little chores and found that Path::Iterator::Rule worked pretty nicely. I did not read your code carefully, but it looks like that module might work as an alternative for you. The module does have -X tests and I found it to be pretty simple to configure rules.

If nothing else, I find that looking at how another module approaches a problem sometimes helps me better understand the module I am working with...

Just a thought...