This module has a way to go yet and still has some very significant issues particularly the failure to recognise an incremented version number and thus the requirement for an update.....

Absolutely. There's lots of work to be done, and your patches will help, I'm sure. Just because Module::Build isn't perfect doesn't mean it won't succeed. Of course it needs lots of people looking at it on many different platforms. Hopefully my article will help convince more people to take a look at it, which will result in more bug reports and a better tool in the end.