I need the use encoding 'utf8' plumbering to make CGI and CGI::FastTemplate work properly with utf8 pages.

As I pointed out above, there should be no need to use either utf8 or encoding "utf8" if your code and string literals are not utf-8 encoded - if all the code opens the template files with the right settings.

I'm going to blame CGI::FastTemplate, since I highly doubt it opens unicode templates using the utf-8 layer. If it did there would be no need to use any of the encoding modules.

use utf8;
use encoding 'utf8';
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There should be no need to use encoding "utf8" when you already do a use "utf8"; As I said above. In fact they seem to break each other. As far as I know "use utf8" is the more standard of the two. If you want to have utf8-encoded scripts, you should probably use (only) utf8;.