Sorry, I'm afraid that I'm going to disappoint you...
- division: I fail to see how a division helps with either testing with different emacs versions or finding contributors providing Perl tests. I do see, however, some overhead to set up that process and document how to use it. So that's still pretty low on my priority list.
- Outsourcing docs: That is another job for Shouldbedone-Man. I don't see enough benefit right now.
- info format: Having convenient access to perldocs documentation from within Emacs is a valid requirement. The requirement is not exactly new, but the tool suggested in the answer to Sean's article seems to have rotted away. So it's either getting pod2info or pod2texi back to life, or ... but wait... It seems that you already have a solution. Care to share?
- The decision to drop support for older and other versions hasn't be done by me, but by the Emacs maintainers, before I started to hack on cperl-mode. I've only removed some conditionals where cperl-mode worked around XEmacs quirks, or provided workarounds for old Emacs versions. I intend my work to be a drop-in replacement for the cperl-mode which comes with Emacs - or maybe even become the maintainer of cperl-mode, a position which has been vacant for quite some time now. So, no, renaming is not an option.
I was thinking of translating Perl regex to lisp to open up for a broader audience.
Excellent! Please go ahead!