Using WoMan on Linux actually already showed me plenty of Perl pods, I think those were installed via apt for system perl and automatically converted to .3pm files. And tab completion is supported and fast, it's parsing and caching all man paths.

FWIW, I looked into the code of woman-mode and I think it's possible to patch it to have a perlman-mode.

But I have to delay that project till after the current ones.

> Mouse-over tool tips

cperl-toggle-autohelp (you need to set the timer too) - I combined it with tooltip.el to show a popup.

> The "redraw" bug:

I think it's a bug in 27 and 28, WoMan was only able to set the imenu-index if I set it at startup.

the redraw bug is also effecting window-management, it will also split again to two POD windows even after I disabled it.

> speedbar support:

looking into the code of ECB might help, they have imenu to speedbar support

> Syntax highlighting of code sections:

Syntax-Highlighting is tricky in dynamic buffers which are actively edited. But POD is static.

You might want to have a look into how org-mode is doing it for code section.

polymode.el sounds promising too, but I wasn't able to see a working example.