Quite a lot of your requests with respect to formatting (points 4, 6 and 8) aren't something I've even thought about - I just hit ret and tab a lot :-)

I'm just lazy; I expect more from my software than that (e.g. it shouldn't be too hard to automate away having to hit return and tab a zillion times).

FWIW, I've found the answer to a couple of my questions (ok...I concede, I should have looked closer at cperl-mode's docs before posting...my bad). C-j is useful for getting you to the next line at the correct indent. In combination with the various "electric" settings -- like cperl-electric-keywords -- it makes editing so much easier.

Expect more from your software. :)