I'm intentionally restricting myself to the core modules to learn Perl more properly before I go out using other solutions, if that makes sense.

Sure, I understand. For other tasks, like say HTML parsing, there's several different good modules to choose from, but for CSV, Text::CSV_XS falls into the (small) group of modules that can always be recommended, since it's pretty much the standard CSV parsing module so it's worth learning in addition to core Perl.