perlref says:

(Symbolic references are sometimes called "soft references", but please don't call them that; references are confusing enough without useless synonyms.)

I wholeheartedly agree.

I wish perl5.000 had bitten the bullet and outlawed symbolic refs unless you specifically said something like use symrefs;

In some ways, use strict 'refs' doesn't fit in with use strict 'vars' or 'subs'; the latter are pretty much never a good idea. Even in a one-liner, declaring your vars or quoting your strings hardly takes any effort. But taking code that uses symbolic refs and changing it to hard refs (or symbol table manipulation via %main:: instead) takes an actual logic change.