what you have posted is iso-8859-1 or equivalent -- i.e. single-byte per accented character

I don't know exactly what I have posted (i.e. didn't run a sniffer to see the actual request from my browser) but I do know that perlmonks.org is sending me Content-Type: text/html, charset=ISO-8859-1. Unfortunately, that's not my fault. I can assure you that my files are in UTF-8:

$ file lorem-ipsum2 
lorem-ipsum2: UTF-8 Unicode text
[download]

I can solve one of your problems by adding "-CS" to the perl command line

Great! I've never payed much attention to -C because I thought that Perl would auto detect that things for me. But it seems I should be adding it to my bash alias and use it always on this system.

Apparently, the docs are a bit misleading about what the default behavior is

I didn't get confused by the docs and was expecting that result before getting it, but it was possible that I was overlooking something in the documentation that allowed me to get the output I wanted. That's why I asked. So if I thought about patching the code for fixing my encoding problem, now I'm thinking to patch to address this indentation issue :^).