Your comment:

I believe this allows Perl to be regarded as a tool for expressing one's creativity and culture while still doing his/her job. This is unarguably a good thing.

Hmmm. I am not sure I totally agree with you here. When managing a large development project, with 20 developers involved, the last thing I want to manage is individual programmers expressing their "creativity and culture" in strange ways. (I recall one programmer who would intersperse his code with latin comments.)

Imagine that a year or two in the future, you are the sole maintenance programmer for a system developed by ten programmers all given full rein to their individual expressions of creativity and culture. All the more reason for enforcing a site standard in style and structure.

Of course, in a well managed team, peer reviews and code walkthroughs should remove the most extreme cases of wierd individual style.