Monks, I am forever indebted! Through your feedback, talking to some folks, and some experimentation... it now works as expected!

So it turns out you MUST push enter before sending Ctrl_. So I coded that as a "put("\n")" (print and cmd instead of put returned a bunch of gobbledygook, put comes back clean). Glory be, the combo of that and your suggestions worked! Here is the final relevant chunk of code:

if (defined($port)) {
        my $exit = "";
        print "    Connected To Switch $switch!\n";
        $output = $obj->put("\n");
        my $switchexit = $obj->put("\037"); sleep 2;
        $output = $obj->put("D");
    } else {
        print "    Not Connected To Switch $switch...\n";
    }
}
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