I remember that the first times I had to use nested data structures, I did not know much about references and I certainly did not understand that, say, an AoH really was an array ofr references to anonymous hashes. That did not prevent me from using some form of baby Perl syntax to use successfully AoH or HoH with simple statements such as:

$foo[5]{'bar'} = "baz";
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So you can use, to a certain extent, such data structures without having to care abbout the fact that you are really dealing with an array of references, and that's what I cared mostly at the time. Now, of course, when you need to go further, you need a deepter understanding of how the structure works, and I had to go through this process. But when I started to use such nested data structure, I was certainly happy that I could do it without having to go through the brain stress of using this structure AND having to understand references.