Yeah, after posting this question, I boned up on Moose construction. One important thing I learned is that Moose will just throw out arguments to the object that aren't used; I had always assumed that would throw an error. So what I ended up doing is using a combination of BUILDARGS and BUILD to process the arguments passed to the constructor before setting the attribs attribute and was able to just get rid of the attrIbs attribute. I think it has made my code a little less inscrutable.

That sounds so bizzare when you say it out loud, is Moose really that impenetrable?