You can't get away from some sort of stimuli generator, driver or whatever you call it to wiggle the inputs. So is monitor. That's the basics of a verification environment.
You can develop driver/monitor in HDL, but HVL (high-level verification language) makes it much easier. HVLs usually come with a lot of features for verification purpose. If you want to develop a nice environment that does automatic checking, random stimuli generation, functional coverage, I don't see how you can do that in current HDL.
OVL is just a simple extension to verification environment. It doesn't do much. And it can't replace testbench.
The bottom line is, if you care about the mask, verification is very important -- over 60% of your project time. If you don't care about the cost or you're just doing FPGA design, you can probably cut corners in verifcation efforts.