On the other hand, if I were to adopt this idea, I wouid be tempted to push things to extremes, and factor out the redirection into a variable:

Yep, I use a subroutine very much like that quite often. The sub usually looks more like:

sub my_open {
  my ($file,$mode,$error_text)=@_;
  $mode||='<';
  $error_text||="While opening in '$mode':$!:$file";
  open my $fh, $mode, $file 
     or Carp::confess $error_text;
  return $fh
}
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I like having the error messages following the resource in question and a colon; all the rest of the Unix toolkit tends to follow that philosophy, and I don't see any value in bucking the trend.

Good point.

Colour me unconvinced.

I wasnt trying to convince people, just to see what they thought. :-)