Just the sheer unperlish'ness of the act of having unencrypted passwords is so ugly. I fell like having been in bed with someone who has HIV, honestly.
Just to be one of the 50k club dropping his mind here: Once I've been in the place to decide: plain pw's (5 minutes more of perl code) versus hashed ones. My immediate reaction was: GOSH, plain passwords suck - i'll never ever do that, and didn't. It was just against my believe of beeing cool.
Frankly, someone here was a devil in disguise. He should be spotted and sent not to a security but "fundamental attitudes" seminar payed from the perl foundation.