This is perhaps another case in favor of something like arhuman's Workshop Area idea -- a place where new and seasoned alike can work together, issue and take on assignments and whatnot.

As that doesn't exist (yet), another place you might want to look to exersise your talent is programming contests -- not necessarily entering them, but in working old problem sets. I'm thinking of the ACM programming contests in particular. You can find PDF's of the 2000 regional contest problem sets at this site, and searching google will turn up other sites with contests, or past acm contest problem sets.

Now, such contests rarely have useful or practical problems in the everyday sense, rather, they are usually more abstract computer-science / algorithm / datastructure related problems (sometimes couched in real world terms, or as puzzles or mazes or some such thing). But you might find that working through some of them with Perl might be a rewarding challenge (perhaps with a decent algorithm/datastructure book at your side, like the clr book).