When I said ease, I should've said "ease of laziness" or "ease of not bothering". Personally, I hate using hashes as OO representations, at least directly. I don't want to think about how my object is represented in memory. Not using an OO-rep module forces me to do my own representation management. To me, that's very un-Perlish.

I guess the sarcasm didn't come through in my first post. I apologize for any misunderstanding.

Yes, the all-objects-in-array in the Panther book sucks with serialization. (The fix is actually relatively simple.)

The other issue, however, is a straw man. You don't worry about the code required to maintain a CGI::Application or a DBI connection, do you? A well-tested CPAN module means you don't have to maintain the code. In fact, you don't know or care what code is required to do something, so long as it does it.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.