From your reply above: "It would be very painful to have to copy and paste almost everything from line 8 to line 213 (nearly 6kb) in the current module to every script which uses the 5 hash subroutines the module currently exports. Oh guh..."

From your homepage: "I would like this to be the last time I have to defend my use of separated values. I try to stay away from the database topic as much as possible these days whenever it comes up."

This is where databases fit into the picture. Start kicking and screaming.