Really, all < signs in your pod should be encoded as E<lt>.

No, no, no! POD is not a "let's make the programmer jump through as many hoops as we can language". The following quote is from man perlpod:

The Intent

The intent is simplicity of use, not power of expression.

Another quote, the first sentence of the description:

Pod is a simple-to-use markup language used for writing documentation for Perl, Perl programs, and Perl modules.

There is no need to encode every < as E<lt> - that would violate the first principle of POD - that writing documentation should be simple.

All inline markup in POD consists of a single capital letter followed by one or more less then signs. Any other less then sign is not markup, and hence, does not need to be written as E<lt>.