"Using modules where appropriate" is one thing, but it can be taken too far. A lot of these programs are designed to be installed on rather broken Perl installations. That is, good luck trying to get Date::Manip installed. Or Perl 5.5.3. When they finally get 5.8, they'll realize that our fearless Borg pumpking has assimilated many useful things, but that could be another several years.

I'd dock points for reinventing wheels provided by the language or in the core library of reasonably recent versions (5.4 is reasonable). qx(date) is one thing, but I've seen programs that write files and then shell out to system grep several times.

Color me sympathetic to the people stuck on systems adminstered by the slightly-less-than legitimate operator from heck (incompetent, not evil), but I have very little mercy for people who think they write code worth sharing without even having skimmed perlfunc.