You have just described my experience with Class::Std.

It took me a while to grok it, longer to debug why my constructor wasn't working, then a bit more to peer into the guts and figure out why something I was used to doing (deriving auxilliary member variables from either a default value or its user-overridden replacement) wasn't going to work unless Damian changed how Class::Std works. I filed a feature request via RT, but the change might actually introduce subtle bugs into existing Class::Std derivatives, so I don't think it can be done.

I've gone back to using hash-based objects by default, but I use the inside-out technique every once in a while. It came in handy when I wanted to associate some instance variables with a blessed filehandle. http://www.rectangular.com/svn/kinosearch/trunk/lib/KinoSearch/Store/InStream.pm