You might say CGI.pm is the emacs of web programming. As far as I care, CGI.pm can pile whatever it wants in there. The overhead of CGI programming is absurd anyway. What would your mom say, you forking perls like that? Shame! :)

For getting params, it's identical to use Apache::Request as to use CGI.pm. The advantage of CGI.pm is its generation of HTML elements, everyone realizes, but that itself is a no-no if you're working with HTML designers, where you want to separate the HTML from the Perl as much as possible.

About the LWP part, I'm kind of confused, but I guess I never happened to use the LWP-ish parts of CGI.pm. I think, if you only need to use the LWP-ish parts, then definitely use LWP. Sometimes I just 'use CGI::Util' say, if I want to URL-encode something, or CGI::Cookie.pm for cookies (actually I would use Apache::Cookie, but anyway... :)