I will toss my vote to using CPAN everywhere you can ... even for little things that seem “obvious,” because in this way you leverage what that other person has done. In many commercial data-processing scenarios, reliable and efficient use of human ... not computer ... time is paramount. Hence, CPAN is to me “what all the fuss is about.”

Getting the app to-market quickly, and making sure it does not fail there, is essential to the conditions by which I earn my daily bread. “The app,” of course, consists of “installed and working source-code,” along with a fair amount of XS-magic inherent in much of CPAN. So the question becomes:   how did that source-code get there, and who wrote it and tested it?

The notion that “it all must have come from little-old-me” absolutely falls flat on my stone deaf ears. I need the best source-code on my team, from whatever most-reliable source, as quickly as possible.

You can incorporate modules from CPAN (or from any external source) into your applications without making system-wide changes. All you need is use lib, and a few easy local CPAN-configuration settings. Having downloaded and built the modules once, you can subsequently package them so that the deployment process is automated.

What is not economically justifiable, IM2CW, is “let's do it all over again from scratch.” Even if you could do it, and even if you could do it in some “superlative way,” you could also be doing something else. “So, as I am looking everywhere I can find to cut costs, why exactly am I paying you the big-bucks to do what has already been done? ...”   :-O   ... hey, especially these days, it's worth thinking about.