This entire discussion is only marginally on topic-- seeing as it's a Perl forum, I suppose discussions of future Perls is almost OK. However, Perl 6 has numerous mailing lists devoted to it that would be better places to complain about the changes that are proposed.

However, in the spirit of problem solving, creative thinking, and doing more than one way I offer the following:
The dot operator is nice. Too bad if they are going to change all current uses of -> into . for both method calls and indirect references. I like the arrow for indirection since it gets that whole pointer notion across. OTOH, I like the dot for method calls, it's similar to other languages (so I have to mode-flip less) and then we can all start to comfortably borrow ideas and maybe even code more easily from other languages. The thing I most hope to see with a Visual Basic-like with $Foo.( set_location( 'boot camp' ), drop(), give_me( 50 ) ); where the function calls internal to the with $Foo. will all be done on the $Foo instance.

As for concatenation. Simplest way to concatenate without white space: my $new_var = "$old_x$old_y"; Besides, interpolation makes the intent of the statement more obvious. In the situations where the things being concatenated are not themselves values like scalars, list items, or hash members, then the _ is no less clear than . and would need to be changed anyway to accomodate the . change in method calls.