What?

ActiveState's "refined collection of modules where each update to them is reviewed at a code/manual level" are simply packaged CPAN modules:

ActiveState maintains repositories of precompiled CPAN packages that can be installed with either the PPM command-line client, or the PPM GUI application.

...and:

ActiveState downloads all new packages from CPAN once a day and tries to build them for each supported platform.

Please stop fear mongering. ActiveState is nothing more than Perl bundled in such a way as to cause lock in.