The thing is, if I'd spent three fruitless days trying to get it to work in perl, I'd understand if someone said "Why would you want to use perl for this when mod_rewrite is much more suited to the job?"

You see, I fully agree that your sample .htaccess should work. But it didn't. Three days is no exaggeration. I'm talking three full days of maybe 10 hours each where I literally did nothing but try different variations on the exact code in your example. There were probably a couple of dozen different ways that I could get it to work on my test server, but none of them worked on the live server. None!

Then after getting nowhere for 3 days, I wrote 8 lines of perl in about a minute and it worked the first time. I like that!

Hey, who knows, maybe given another 3 days, or maybe 6 or 60, I would've got mod_rewrite to work! But I'd rather be happy now than 60 days from now. : )