It sounds like you're making good progress. You're definitely thinking in a healthy way about it (there are a lot of people out there who swear they'll 'never' use certain methods - then do).

I've done things in a similar way to you. My code when I started was horrific. It was like BASIC programming. Everything was done in tiny steps, tons of lines, no use of map or grep, if statements everywhere, no OO. I've been coding in Perl for 8 years now and it's only in the last few that I've mastered OO, the templating systems, and most of the idioms.

I don't think you can rush all this. Of course, you could go a lot faster than I did (Perl wasn't my job for the first 4 years or so - just hacking together bits for my Web sites etc), but I don't think you should make giant leaps in multiple areas at the same time. Getting up to using databases is a great step, and now you can focus on the next one.

Your strength with OO will come, in time, and you'll see new situations where it is highly useful. Of course, there are many cases where you won't want to use it, and quite rightly so :-) Just keep hacking, I say! Good luck!