"Even when I do write OO distributions (most of mine are), I don't use anything but the core perl OO functionality"

Is this because you dislike the Moose-like syntax, because of speed concerns, or because you don't want to create dependencies on non-core modules for end users.

If it's because of speed or dependencies, you should look at Mite. Mite allows you to write Moose-like code, "compile" it on your machine into plain Perl, and distribute the compiled result so your end users don't need any non-core modules.