Choose ones that have been recently updated, or are in higher versions, as they generally are better maintained and more developed

That's quite a bold statement. Lots of activity may also be a sign of a high bug rate, or creature feep. "High" versions numbers are an even less useful indication. Is PHP an on par choice to Perl because both have (major) version number 5? Will PHP become a better choice if they declare their 6.0 to be ready before Perl does?

If you can use modules which have been assimilated into the core release, this is often good too, because they are stable and well tested

So you hope. That's only true for part of the modules in the core. Many "core" modules are "dual released" - the modules are found on CPAN, maintained (or not...) by someone other than p5p, and are just synced with the latest CPAN version before a Perl release. Inclusion in the core doesn't mean more than that someone in the past thought it was a good idea. And once there, it'll be there forever. Witness modules like CGI and Text::Soundex.