This reply of yours came before I finished my update, which I hope will be helpful. As for this latest example -- WOW! That certainly does validate the assumption I made in my update: anybody stupid enough to generate thousands of lines of duplicative, copy/paste code is bound to do all kinds of dumb-a$$ s#!t...
I'm too tired to digest your code suggestions now (00:57 EST) but I will. I'd like to thank all who took the time to reply, I am getting exactly what I had hoped for: new ideas to toss around. This is what I love about Perl. :)