In general, there's a lack of finished applications/utilities on CPAN

Actually, quite a few CPAN modules have complete examples in their documentation and or their tarballs. Let's pick one at random from my field of expertise. Webservers. Like HTTP::Daemon. You'll find this example in the POD:

use HTTP::Daemon;
  use HTTP::Status;

  my $d = HTTP::Daemon->new || die;
  print "Please contact me at: <URL:", $d->url, ">\n";
  while (my $c = $d->accept) {
      while (my $r = $c->get_request) {
          if ($r->method eq 'GET' and $r->uri->path eq "/xyzzy") {
              # remember, this is *not* recommended practice :-)
              $c->send_file_response("/etc/passwd");
          }
          else {
              $c->send_error(RC_FORBIDDEN)
          }
      }
      $c->close;
      undef($c);
  }
[download]

On second thought, i guess you are right, after all. The example given might be a tad insecure, doesn't handle even basic HTTP headers and might be a bit prone to denial of service attacks.

Ok, ok, i give up. I completly agree with you. More complete examples and working products would be a very nice thing indeed!