Well, if "things are still clear as mud", maybe that's a sign, eh? My advice, for what's it's worth, is that you should not make it a mission requirement to understand everything on CPAN before you proceed. You know a way to solve the problem already, maybe you should just do it that way.

I haven't looked at a lot of the modules under discussion, though I took a brief excursion into "Class::DBI" back when it was getting a lot of buzz, and I found it very dissapointing. It takes the attitude that objects are everything, and sacrifices any hope of elegance on the RDBMS level, and if anything, I think the opposite approach is more sensible. Start with a good database schema, work up the SQL you're going to use to access it, start writing wrapper methods around the SQL, and don't worry too much about your object metaphors (consider that any verb can be nouned, if need be: "this is the 'Nounifier::Handler' object").

All of that said, the primary technical rationale for working that way is to allow the app to scale by avoiding crippling the database. If your database is already crippled (*cough* mysql myiasm tables *cough*) it may not matter, and if you're happy restricting this address book app to light duty use, it doesn't matter that much anyway, and the claimed speed of development of something like "Maypole" may be just what you need. Maybe a webapp seems like overkill, but at least it'll work as an alternate to your command line tools, right? Better overkill than under.

Myself though, I'm trying to get away from developing toy applications for my own use: I want to at least hold the door open to the possibility of letting other people use my code, in which case the web interface could be just the thing... except that takes it back to what I was saying before about making sure that things can scale.