I'd probably not use a dispatch hash then. Dispatch hashes are more of a smallscale solution. It might make more sense to have classes implementing the actions and various mapping mechanisms that translate from input to method calls. In case of a command line input, a dispatch hash would of course be an obvious approach to implementing such a mapper. In other cases, the mapping may pose very different requirements.

I don't know, it's hard to say without any concrete idea about the requirements of the design you're talking about.

Makeshifts last the longest.