Then perhaps it would be better to advocate this approach instead of the more symmetrically beautiful "@{[]}".

It might lead more people to learn of the weird but wonderful context properties of  \. (Sometimes people wonder why perl doesn't have a "list" operator corresponding to "scalar". The answer usually given is that it would rub the camel hair the wrong way, or that it is never needed. In point of fact it is sometimes needed when doing things like recursive calls to subroutines that return a map. And the way you spell list(EXPR) is ${\(EXPR)}.)