Let's turn this on its head. Basically, you're saying

• I have a class and a method of that class. Let's call them Foo and bar().
• I have a set of parameters. Let's call them @params.
• I want to get back an object (called $obj) blessed into class Foo::Child.

In other words, you have

my $obj = Foo->bar( @params );
isa_ok( $obj, 'Foo::Child' );
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A factory does not need to be an object, regardless of whatever anyone told you. A factory can be a class. You have a factory pattern and it makes perfect sense. I have a very similar setup in Excel::Template with Excel::Template::Factory. I pass it a nodename and it gives me back an object that represents the node. That is the definition of a factory. Whether it's a class method or an object method is a function of whether or not you need more than one factory running at the same time.