I don't see that there's any way of really achieving what I wanted

Well, you can't extract a nail with a Phillips head screwdriver, either. There are many different renderers of POD... use the one that gives you the most suitable results.

perldoc is a thin wrapper around Pod::Man. You may achieve better results with Pod::Text. The pod2text (which in turn is a wrapper around Pod::Text) has a number of knobs you can twiddle to alter the output. Maybe you'll find something suitable with that.