I agree. If expect to use the code for more than once, I always take the time for readability. And I usually try to leave a comment line saying what I was thinking at the time, not how I wrote it that day - 'comment at the level of intent' as McConnell would say.

For every Perl idiom, there is usually more than one way of writing it - TMTOWTDI, after all - and they will surely occupy different points on the readability spectrum. Not to mention the 'pedanticness' spectrum.