I think you've asked too many questions (and updated the post a bit much if memory serves) to get many answers to some of your subpoints. You wrote "No support for (or by) Catalyst" for both CDBI and Rose. This isn't true.

Catalyst is entirely Model agnostic. Essentially it has support for any Model. Last week, for example, I rewrote two old Controllers, one RSS handler and one flat file reader, as Models. A Model can be anything that returns data. Lots of Cat folks use Rose (its reputation is very good though I haven't broken down to learn it yet; it would probably be an academic exercise since DBIC has yet to let me down). DBIC happens to be the default in the Cat docs but anyone who gets familiar with Cat would be able to easily substitute Rose.