Re: CPAN!
you'll pretty commonly find people stating that regexes are not a good match for non-trivial html processing so I am unclear as to the point you are trying to make. the host language has little to do with it.
in other news, a carpenter congratulates himself for using a screwdriver to fasten screws.
personally, while I avoid PERL it's solely because of the profuse use of special symbols and special operators - cryptic and unreadable code might be expected and tolerable in short awk or sed scripts but they're misplaced in a general purpose, to-be-maintained-later programming language.
regexes have that old joke going - you have a problem and you use a regex, now you have 2 problems. and they are also slower than simple string slicing and comparisons. but when used judiciously and with an aim to readability they are brilliant little tools.