Ultimately, I read your post and I merely think "problems? What problems?" Perl is doing just fine without a standard ORM or a standard IDE or a standard framework or anything. Just like every other really successful open platform, in fact -- look at C++, look at Java, look at Python, none of them have a single standard framework or a single standard IDE. The only cases where lockin is accompanied by any sort of success are certain languages peddled by a certain monopoly, which shall remain nameless for purely pragmatic reasons: I can't type their names because I can't find a hash key on this damn Mac keyboard. (Good thing I'm not writing any Perl, or it would be decidedly low on comments...)

And to pick up on a slightly irrelevant aside:

Is there a Gnome equivalent to the super-simple Tortoise-SVN shell extension for Windows? Right-click->SVN->Update doesn't get any easier.

Really? It sounds quite complicated to me. Certainly more effort than just typing "svn up". The command-line version also has the advantage of working everywhere, whereas if you insist on non-standard GUIs you'll be at a loss again when you find yourself working on a Mac one day...