I am interested to hear what you say about XML::RSS/RAI. I use these modules quite a lot, and (after adding in some encoding guessing routines), they have handled pretty much all of my requirements.

Why is the Universal Feed Parser so much better (I've never used it)?

And, having taken a brief look at the code, it looks like it'd be reasonably easy to translate into Perl (all 2500 lines), wouldn't it? Again, no experience of Python code either, but the syntax looks pretty similar and the modules that they use are also available on CPAN.

Not that I'm suggesting that that is what you should do in order to meet a deadline..., but if it really is so good, it'd be great to have it available in perl. And the 4000 tests that they provide would be a great way to prove the perl version.