I am not sure that I buy your argument in this case. SimpleList takes care of a lot behind the scenes, so I am not sure I should throw it out just because I am doing something a little bit more complicated with it. I think the end result - using SimpleList to build the model and then delving into the TreeModel backend to do the hard stuff. As far as it not being a perl thing, well, I would argue that since I am using a Perl API that it is at least somewhat of a perl thing. At least enough of a perl thing to try out the sanity of perlmonks before the chaos of the mailing lists.