Congratulations, Nic, on what is likely the world's first Emacs-hosted startup! For those who don't know, teamchat is implemented in Emacs Lisp using Nic's elnode (async web server) and shoesoff (IRC bouncer) libraries, among others.
I know a guy here in the States who would probably be glad to work up something for you at a reasonable price. My contact info is in my profile if you'd like me to put you in touch with him.
If you visit #emacs or #lisp on freenode it's very likely someone can help you get Slime sorted out on your Mac. Many of the regulars there use such a setup (including myself).
I left Perl behind some time ago, but I second epi0Bauqu's recommendation of Perlmonks. It's quite an amazing community and resource, and well worth exploring.
With all due respect, your assertion that software engineering lacks extreme safety requirements is false. Like any engineering discipline, software engineering is applied to both safety critical and non-safety critical domains.
When I was in school this article[0] was required reading. Your life and safety depend on software engineers every time you dial 911, ride an airplane, etc. Not everyone is writing Facebook applications :)
I'd agree with this, and even take it a bit farther. Many of the graduate level courses have lecture notes online and these can often give insight into current research. Here's a page with links to EE/CS courses: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/classes-eecs.html
Another thing to watch for, besides talks specifically open to the public, is lecture series taken for credit, such as {EE,CS}{198,298} in the above page. I took EE298.2 last semester for example, a communications/networking/DSP seminar, which had visiting scholars presenting their current research at almost every meeting. Nobody would have cared or probably even noticed if a random person showed up to listen.
I was lurking on #lisp for most of today and it seems to me you're being a bit oversensitive. You asked about packages at 14:23. Several people tried to figure out exactly what you were asking, including gigamonkey (the author of PCL!). At 14:26 rahul mentioned "asdf" which is probably what you are looking for. If you had at that point Googled 'asdf lisp' and felt lucky, you would have gone straight to this page: http://www.cliki.net/asdf , which contains a script to automatically generate packages as well as some other Windows-specific information that you were asking about. Otherwise, at 14:39 in the complete log, jamesjb pointed you to a tarball containing an example system. Not too shabby IMHO.
Incidentally, http://www.cliki.net/IRC mentions #cl-gardeners and #lispcafe as more novice-friendly than #lisp, though I've never been too troubled by my own experiences there as a newcomer to Lisp.
There's certainly a lot of interest and activity around entrepreneurship at Berkeley. This URL gives a sense of some of what's happening here: http://cet.berkeley.edu/curriculum.htm