However, I believe the syntax %h->{a} is (from what I can make of it) equivelent to $h{a}.. IMO, It's just syntactically clearer.

I'll grant you that it works, but you'll be hard-pressed to find many experienced Perl coders to agree with your assessment that it is "syntactically clearer." It... well... it just isn't. Besides that, it's deprecated in 5.8 so you would do yourself a favor by starting to avoid it now.

$ perl -Mstrict -wle 'my %h=qw(foo bar); print %h->{foo}'
Using a hash as a reference is deprecated at -e line 1.
bar
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