One of the annoyances I've had with Catalyst (apart from a hellish install on my old Redhat server) is that the developers didn't seem to get the Rails philosophy even though they were building a rails clone. Fortunately it seems a lot of the problems have been covered by other hackers (god bless CPAN) through the introduction of Catalyst::Enzume one stop shopping for Catalyst::Crud. CRUD for Class::DBI as well as sensible template defaulting helps tremendously when speed is of the essence. And speed is always of the essence.