In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM.
After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/d69f5b0cee13102a9167
So, I've satisfied your request, "Try using cpan to install basic modules like MySQL". I guess that means you admit OS X "can do pretty much any Unix based task that GNU/Linux can"?
In the end after seeing the complex work arounds and all the warnings about buggering up your mac OS install I gave up and run a VM.
After all the nice people that employ me want me to do some nifty Machine learning tools to save a week a month running single adwords account.