I sent an email to Matt Wright a few weeks ago, and I included a link to some discussion on Perl Monks regarding the cruftiness of the MSA code.
His response said that he would love to rework his scripts, and has even done work on some of them, but other projects have taken up too much of his time (and I'm sure we all know how that feels).
Here is an idea: If someone were to create drop-in relacements for any or all of his scripts and send them to him, I think that he would be more than happy to replace the ones on his site, and give credit where credit is due.
So, we should stop complaining and start coding ;)