why would someone go through the extra TROUBLE in using the OO aspect of CGI instead of just hard coding the HTML manually using heredocs?

You mean HTML tag generation by functions/methods, instead of by embedded literal HTML? Oh, some reasons:

• Proper tag nesting is enforced by the nature of scripts
• Easing automatic generation of some HTML, like the choices in dropdown boxes, and automatic escaping of entered values
• Sticky values, i.e. when generating similar HTML again from the form input, values get automatically filled in with the old values. This eases error processing: the programmer doesn't need to do anything extra, while the user gets the old values he typed in last time back, so he doesn't have to start all over from scratch.

To me, the latter point would be its major selling point, thought enforcement of proper tag nesting is a good second.

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