Another "feature" that's bitten me in the butt is the silent "upgrading" (i.e. corruption) of non-UTF8 scalars when concatenated with UTF8 scalars...

Then you want encoding::warnings.

Think there's any chance these behaviors could change in Perl 5.10? Is it worth bringing up on p5p?

Sure, but keep in mind that a lot of very smart people have put a lot of thought into the existing behavior, and where there are flaws or caveats, alternative behavior was judged to be worse. If you want to propose a change, make sure you think through the possible drawbacks.

It sounds like you want the utf8 flag on handles to go away and just have the output encoding depend on perl's internal encoding of the data - this sounds very bad in a number of ways.

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