The fact that you can't even use Tie::File correctly says everything: The non-Tie implementation is clearly the easier of those two implementations.

Aside the fact that your Tie::File code only saved you one line (after getting rid of those closes) and that replaced well-known operations with obscure ones, you forgot to throw an error for non-existing files in your Tie::File solution, and you hid the fact that you have to use a bunch of encodes and decodes with Tie::File while the alternative automatically uses the one encoding you set using use open.