Nice post. I like this idea; it makes for nice looking and simple code at the user level, yet allows for a good bit of power behind the scenes.

One thing I noticed though. You're passing a hash reference, but accessing it as if it's a list of key-value pairs with my %args = @_. Am I missing something here, or is it just a small bug? Lord knows I've had that bug before, which is the reason I noticed it.