Thank you!!! This is very interesting, what I had ended up doing was this:

BEGIN { 
 $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT}=~m/^([\w\-\/]+)$/i; 
 eval "use lib '$1/../lib';"; 
}

# this is unreliable:
#BEGIN {
# use lib do {
#   $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT}=~m/^([\w\-\/]+)$/i;
# } . '/../lib';
#}
[download]

It's similar, (my HOME was not set )just a hack, so there must be some hole the size of *## that I'm not noticing yet.
It checks a little bit for an ok path

Is there any setup that by default looks for a perl lib for the user like home/perl-lib ? I guess I'm thinking of maybe some movement to do this by a hosting company, etc. Maybe it's just no big deal. It seems a lot of dabblers and devels would find that to be one more candy piece.