Templates ++, and using modules to do stuff that's already been done ++.

A lot of what I notice is you're re-inventing the wheel with how you've coded this (not your idea, just how it's written). If you did a couple pretty basic searches on CPAN, i bet you could get rid of a lot of your hand coded regexps and have something pretty solid, clean, fast, and virtually unbreakable.

As far as the code, it looks incredibly organized and well documented, which is something i can't say for even most of my code. Takes a good deal of patience to do such a thing. ++ to you when i get my votes from the vote fairy.

And one last note, throwing yourself to the wolves ain't always a bad thing, sometimes you need to just get a swift kick in the butt to get precious programming and other such values engrained into you.

HTH.