Would it help if the README or some piece of documentation somewhere (if not README, then what?) said that it's okay to use prove to run the tests, and that any patches can safely ignore dzil if you don't want to use it?

Thinking further on this, if we could agree on the basic wording for such a blurb, someone could easily write a DZ plugin to have that deposited in your README automatically. :-D Not sure if this engenders a chicken-and-egg issue, but I bet it could be worked out.