I haven't built anything serious in it, but I was impressed with amount of off-the-shelf stuff available in the Catalyst framework.

e.g. there are a bunch of different Catalyst plugin's to handle sessions, storing them in different places via different mechanisms: e.g. Catalyst::Plugin::Session::Store::DBI and friends.

As you say, this isn't a new idea - it looks like there are nice black boxes to be plugged together, but you would have to do things the "catalyst way", which takes a little learning.