POE::Component::Generic is an interesting module that I haven't seen before, and that could help a lot of people. I don't mean to knock the quality of POE's implementation. Forking a child process every time you want to do any I/O is still quite a paradigm shift though.

Forked/threaded environments actually do completely eliminate this problem for most people, since the forking is done for them. Think CGI/FastCGI/mod_perl. You don't have to worry about killing the entire server with a thoughtless LWP call in those environments.