Thank you, Your Mother, for your informative reply. Not a day goes by where I do not learn something new from you and your fellow Perl Monks.

I had not even thought about reviews. I looked at http://search.cpan.org/~chorny/Switch-2.17/Switch.pm, but I don't know how to find reviews on that webpage. I surfed over to https://metacpan.org/pod/Switch; I can see the hyperlink for reviews there. I read them and did not find anything particularly damaging; one review concerned Switch (2.16) and the previous one concerned Switch (2.10). My point is that no one in the Perl community has taken the time to write a (negative) review about Switch (2.17) that was released on March 18, 2014; the points made in this thread were much more valuable.

Additionally, we are advised in the documentation: "...do not use if you can use given/when". If I wasn't a Perl Monks website frequenter, I probably would not be aware that given and when are experimental keywords, which is another way of saying don't go building systems around these keywords, because one fine day, the wonderful people that bring us Perl will tell us that the experiment is over and it was (very likely) a failure.

So, in summary, you know this stuff and I know this stuff, but for the casual Perl user, it comes under the unfortunate heading of learning curve, which, as we all know, goes straight up.

I don't have to tell you that somehow, someway, we have to attract new blood into our Perl community. (I know that Real Soon Now robots will be writing the code, but that isn't happening fast enough.) So, if there is someone out there that could devote some neurons to a project, even a small one, even an experimental one, even one in the Acme:: top-level namespace, that could keep beginning and intermediate Perl programmers from pursuing dead ends (like the one described in this thread), it would be one more item that Perl could include in the pro column of the list of pros and cons.