Yep, Perl has Net::DNS. Allow your admin workstation IPs do dynamic DNS registrations in bind, then use Net::DNS::Update to do 99% of what you need. Which is typically just adding or deleting the same old handful of RR types.
Since you're sending/receiving actual DNS packets on the protocol layer, you don't get syntax problems in your hosts file - a "bad" record simply won't get committed. If it's successful, you get a reply packet you can (should) check for. The zone gets incremented etc just like any other dynamic DNS registration.
Obviously you can write script wrappers to do your typical things, like do a bit of syntax-checking of the input. Or create a PTR every time you create an A record in [zone], as long as a PTR doesn't already exist. Or, if there is a PTR, display what's there, prompt for a change, etc etc. If you have a split-brain zone or multiple name servers, a script can update them all at the same time.
The rest of Net::DNS will do general DNS stuff like various RR queries (with a baked-in method of sorting multiple results if you choose, sensibly according to RR type or a custom sort), zone increment, zone transfer, and so on.
Saved my bacon from the late 90s up until less than a decade ago, when I stopped working with bind, across multiple orgs and countries. I think I directly edited a zone file less than half a dozen times (after configuring the environment so I could use my scripts) during that time.
One place in particular could take days to turn around DNS updates (very complex environment) and had errors on at least a monthly basis - with decent scripts, all those problems went away. Certainly no more "fat finger" incidents corrupting the zone files.
Incorrect records being added/deleted, well, you can't entirely fix the GIGO problem - but throwing errors if some idiot tried to enter an IP for an invalid range was certainly helpful.