Cleaning up the cruft sounds like a good idea. I will play around with that in the next few days and let you know how it goes.
>> The main problem is that the cperl-mode code's maintainership has some
>> problems (poor communication and some disagreements between Ilya and the
>> Emacs team).
> Note that there does not seem to have been an upstream release for ~ 4+
> years, AFAICS. The traditional upstream location is 403 today, but
> exists in search engines caches.
> A braver man than I has already forked it some years ago;
> https://github.com/jrockway/cperl-mode
Let me put it some other way:
If/when someone is willing and able to take over maintenance of
cperl-mode (starting with cleaning up the Emacs-19-style-code-cruft),
then I might consider switching the default to cperl-mode.
But it might be easier to start from perl-mode and add cperl-mode chunks
to it.
Stefan