i will agree with you on the overthinking of OO 'stuff'. i do it all the time, mostly because it's 'supposed to be hard' or something. then again, programming is 'supposed to be hard', but it's not *all* that difficult.

the problem, originally, really was in an unnecessarily overridden subclass constructor. rather than calling Super::new(), the subclasses were instantiating enpty hashrefs. there *was* nothing to return via the superclass accessor that way.

next time, i'll have to take more care i nthe 'boiled down' code ... what it *should have read* is:

package HandlerMethods;

use strict;
use base qw/ Handler /;

sub new {
 
   my $self = shift;
   return bless {}, $self;
}

sub doSomething {
   my $self = shift;
   my $page = $self->cgi->param('foo');
  
   return 1;

}
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and there's a real issue, because there *is* no CGI object in the subclass now.