Hello mw. You are not alone! I use(d) "Perl Core Only" (tm) too!
You are not re-inventing the wheel, in fact, you are building a boat. And you can get a mast for free, but your boat is inside a bottle, and that mast just does not fit through the neck. And really, everything to build that boat has to go through that neck, your bottleneck!
You pass tools using uuencode get a file out of the bottle, onto a modern system, just to be able to edit it with vim instead of vi and commit it to a versioning system, then push it back in, improved.

So nay, do not weep! Build that ship (until you can play with speedboats: fast, but they hold no cargo)