Well, besides the eyesight issue, there's the fact that I wasn't actually trained that way in Perl.

When I started at the University of RTFM I was looking at a lot of very ugly code. Lots of global vars up top, massive chunks of comments, lots of repeated lines to populate data, lots of report()/write() sections ... all the glories of Perl 4, Matt's Script Archive; it was ugly.

The first thing I used to do (and still do) was to put in a bunch of blank lines and spaces so I could see what was going on. I got used to writing that way, and maybe because of that, as you say, and maybe because it's intrinsically clearer, I find it it much easier to take in paragraphs of code at a time.

YMMV :-)