Wish I could attend.
Since you want to cover a lot of ground, I would stress the fact that the entire project is doable in perl, i.e. that the different kind of libraries you need, are all available and easy to use/install. So I would go for the combination of architcture and HL solution in perl. If the people are perl savvy enough, they should be able to read the code details, otherwise, they won't follow them anyhow.
Tabari