I don't think that CGI::Application::Dispatch will help in this situation. The op is trying to avoid having to fill out the $self->run_modes() hash and CGI::Application::Dispatch will not help to solve that. However, since the op is motivated by lazyness, CGI::Application::Dispatch is definately something that should be looked into!

CGI::Application::Dispatch helps when you have several CGI::Application modules, and you are tired of writing stub CGI scripts to launch all the modules. It allows you to lauch multiple CGI::Application modules from a single CGI script (or mod_perl handler) by using the PATH_INFO of the URL.

Update: I just re-read the question, and it looks like your suggestion is a good one. I missed the part of the code where the runmodes from a whole bunch of modules where loaded into the main CGI::Application module. Sorry for the confusion.