"Do you feel you can rate the experience level of the author by how the code looks, both in Perl and programming in general?"

Tough question... Take Perl as one example, Perl can easily attracts people to play little tricks. If I see a piece of code that plays tricks here and there, am I facing a experienced Perl programmer? Maybe, but not a programmer with good style. Personally I don't view people with bad style as experienced programmer.