I've meditated enough, I've figured out what to do next. It looks like I need to get PPM working in the interim, look at flattening my include libraries, and do some work with compiling with minGW outside the CPAN shell. So I've updated the original post to integrate the most excellent comments.

Gratias sodales ab camelus

Update: here's what I found on PPM.

In reply to Re: RFC: Changing Perl Config settings by Bloodrage
in thread Changing Perl Config settings by Bloodrage

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