Hello sundialsvc4, and thank you for your gracious response. I am aware of the dangerous waters in which I am dipping my toes, and have to constantly rein in my urge to rewrite from scratch and/or throw my hands up in despair. The solution I have settled on, refactoring the shared start-up code and pulling out chunks of Utility.pm into separate modules, represents a little more than the minimum that could be done, but it's that little bit more that will help me maintain my sanity. ;-)

In hindsight, I probably should have written my question to focus on what a role can or can't be applied to and omitted the context...