Interesting, thanks. Unfortunately, I've got some modules from CPAN which do important work in new() rather than init, like Exception::Class from CPAN. Calling SUPER::init misses all the secret sauce happening in the super class constructor.
for the moment I'm bypassing Class::MethodMaker in those classes which need to call SUPER::new but it seem like a bit of a hack. It would be great to have an option to Class::MethodMaker to call SUPER::new in the generated constructor....