f you regard the former as ugly syntax, then the latter should make you happy. I'm still unclear why it doesn't.

It does make me happy (which is kinda sick when you think about it), but my point really is that without external modules like base, the syntax is ugly. It is difficult to take external modules into account when evaluating the beauty of perl's OO since there are many modules out there doing much like what the OP's module does. To be fair to them, my assessment was of the bare module-less syntax.