"Any problem can be solved by adding another abstraction layer, except that of having too many abstraction layers."

Yes, it is possible to have too many abstraction layers. But as long as abstraction layers improve your productivity more than they cost, they pay for themselves.

That said, when there is an obscure problem, someone has to be able to figure out enough to track it down. Just today I spent an hour tracking down a problem caused by a Mason upgrade. The solution was to change a call to Apache::Request->new to Apache::Request->instance instead. It was a one word bug fix, but how much energy was required to figure out that word! (The bug was that after moving to a current version of Mason, we were no longer able to set TEMP_DIR. If we moved to Apache2, the bug might or might not reappear. If it does, then fixing it will require a patch to Mason.)