I guess you haven't noticed that the entire Perl complement of core functions suffer from "prototypitis". Some are "list ops" and don't suffer as much. But they all have prototypes (including prototypes not available to non-core functions) dictacting what they get passed (though some get lucky and mostly only affect how they get called, just because prototypes are rather blunt instruments).

Unfortunately, there is too much chance for existing code to depend on this scalar context behavior so fixing it isn't simple (though a pragma might work -- I'd like to see such patches being attempted).