Yep, you're right - as above, I don't need to do what I was originally after so long as I don't go around making problems for myself :-)

It's a fairly large framework (~25kloc) for testing SMTP/HTTP etc content scanning proxies. By design, bits of it are quite tightly coupled - the benefit is that it's easy for non-programmers to use - you call Foo::Protocol::SMTP->new(content => spam, ....), the SMTP constructor calls into the rig objects, gets access to machine objects, configures itself appropriately, then when you call $smtp->execute() it connects to RPC daemons on various machines, and does the things you ask for, and collects tcpdumps/logs if it fails.

Things are futher complicated by the fact that it started life as a god object - I did a serious refactor, but as there were dozens of scripts already using the god object, I had to put in a shim layer to make the old stuff work.