Thanks for the additional reply, and for being a bit more explicit in your disagreement. We'll have to agree to disagree, I think.

There are many places in the templates where I do have multiple items and do require Template::Toolkit's dot.notation. I think it's better (and easier for the template maintainer) to be consistent by always using hashes than to switch between hashes and scalars.

The point of my post wasn't to argue about my templating (although this is fine, really, and has given me some additional ideas to chew on), but to find a way to make the code do what I wanted. So far no one's touched upon my original question as indicated by my title; I'll try again.
--
man with no legs, inc.