That's a fact! unpack may be intimidating at first, but if you're looking at fixed-width columns (as your examples seem to indicate), unpack is going to be faster than split. Consider split when you don't have fixed-width data, and unpack when you do.

Another advantage to unpack for fixed-width column data is that if one of the fields should be filled completely (leaving no whitespace at all), splitting on whitespace will fail, while unpack will still work fine.