Sorry I'm late to the party. :-) As the author of Handel, I've lived in both camps. I started with CDBI, and converted to DBIC. The community and past internet argument explosions aside surrounding CDBI, there were two main reasons I moved towards DBIC.

First, DBIC seems to make more of an effort to get out of my way if I want it too. I can delegate to it, or an instance of it (via Schema), rather than having to be it (@ISA Class::DBI). This means I can take a bottom up approach to my DBIC based application; whereas a CDBI based application seems to start at the top and work downword.

Second, DBIC provides an insane amount of flexibility and configuration. There's an option of accessors for just about any step in the process. IT allows me to do things I'd never try with CDBI; things like interchanging schemas into the same app code; being able to inject columns, components, constraints, validaiton, etc into schemas and table objects on the fly...even into instance of table classes, rather than the table class itself.

If you need to do magic, DBIC is more capable of it IMHO.