I don't know what you mean by "non-pragmatic;" maybe it's a jargon term. It's certainly useful to me, and I have the ftp stuff stuffed away in modules, where I keep the functioning part and the data part separated. I've renamed the package "scrubber1" now, which is more descriptive:

package scrubber1;
require Exporter;
use config1;

our @ISA    = qw(Exporter);
our @EXPORT = qw(
  get_ftp_object
  get_html_filenames
  kill_files
);

sub get_ftp_object {
  use strict;
  use Net::FTP;
  use 5.010;
  my $sub_hash = "my_ftp";
  my $domain   = $config{$sub_hash}->{'domain'};
  my $username = $config{$sub_hash}->{'username'};
  my $password = $config{$sub_hash}->{'password'};

  #dial up the server
  my $ftp = Net::FTP->new( $domain, Debug => 1, Passive => 1 )
    or die "Can't connect: $!\n";
  $ftp->login( $username, $password )
    or die "Couldn't login\n";
  return $ftp;
}
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The values for config lie in config1, and these need to be redacted to show:

package config1;
use Exporter    qw(import);
our @EXPORT =    qw(%config);
our %config = (
     my_ftp =>  {
           domain   =>  'redacted',
           username =>  'redacted',
           password =>  'redacted',
          },
     );
1;
[download]

I'm not sure how "just-in-time" compilation works for such a scheme, but from my perspective, it happens really quickly.