Dep, an excellent post. We need sometimes to be a more hesitant about hitting the "just use CGI.pm you fool" autoresponder. Granted, in 99.9 percent of all real life situations (as opposed to learning exercises), CGI.pm, or one of the derivatives from it, like HTML::Mason, Embperl, and so on, will be an excellent foundation.

But we should not let this become blind fervour, unquestioningly accepting that there is only one way to do something. All communities need a good devil's advocate - even if only to convince us we are still doing the right thing.