Using CentOS and RH systems since 2005, though, I have not encountered any of these problems - being a sysadmin - I mix system Perl, CPAN, dag/apt modules all over the place and they all seem to get along fine..

And I do the same on my Debian and Ubuntu boxes. You really can just ignore this issue and you'll most likely be fine... but there are odd cases where you might be burned which you (and I) haven't run into yet.

It really is unlikely that CentOS/RH have some magic solution to these problems (after all, the usual state of affairs is for RH to imitate Debian five years later...).