Parts of this confuse me ... for any hashes you only care about the values? Why use a hash in the first place then? There may be a reason in the larger context of your program I'm missing. Why do the individual dereferencing functions use map when they're only ever passed scalars?

I guess my bottom line question is what is it that just prevents you from doing this:

my @a = @$a_ref;            # I know it's an array
my %h = %$h_ref;            # I know it's a hash
my @h = values(%$h_ref);    # I just want the values

# Bascically what you're doing above.
my @a = (ref($x) eq 'ARRAY') ? @$x : values(%$x);
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