So, you hit the nail on the head with the "exception" hash on point number two. It's weird that this hasn't come up with the other modules.

In the interest of making everything clear for future users, I am going to make sure that any reference to the $exception hash and the $exception->{exception} scalar value is made explicit. It would seem that the original programmer only had to worry about the $exception merely being defined, and in my ignorance, ignored the value of the $exception->{exception} value, even though I was defining it in my return.

I've only been working with perl for the past few months, sop if my vocabulary is off, please excuse me. Thank you for bringing that to my attention though, this has solved my problem.