when talking about general advantages of OO vs import-the-world

Uh, I wasn't making this a general conversation. I was talking specifically about CGI.pm and the typical use (a singleton object, and with people who probably don't want to grok Perl's OO).

Please don't light up a different fire. This one fans well enough. {grin}

Secondly, the CGI documentation still states:
The examples in this document mainly use the object-oriented style.

That's a vestigial text. Look at the examples in the rest of the doc. They've been almost entirely converted to import style. This happened quite recently.

It's not entirely clear that Lincoln has a preference.

It's very clear to me. I've seen Lincoln talk at conferences. In fact, I even filled in for him once. His slides never use the OO form. That's why I wasn't surprised when he finally changed the manpage.