One way to look at the array element is to consider other languages. If you want to access an array element, in most high level languages (C,Java) you would access it as foo[0]. Now, considering PERL's behavior, how do you want to access the memory block that contains foo[0], you want to access it as a scalar ($). This covers both simple arrays, as well as arrays that contain hashrefs and arrayrefs, as those are scalar references to memory locations.

That's how I got over that hump as a beginner, I hope that this could help.