I suppose if you never experienced the ease of "perl Makefile.PL, make, make install" on a module

Not only are you mistaken about my experience, it's much easier to use cpan Module, and even easier to do ppm install Module since it handles external libraries.

So

[Install external dependencies]
[Find URL for Module]
wget [URL for Module]
perl Makefile.PL
make test
make install
[download]

becomes

ppm install Module
[download]

And if that fails,

[Install external dependencies]
cpan Module
[download]

It's basically the equivalent of Debian's

apt-get install perl-module-lib
[download]

except it also works for builds of Perl other than the system build.