I disagree, though not strongly. Each test has a message associated with it ...

So you're not disagreeing you're agreeing :-)

I suspect that the OP is referring to the style of tests which are common in distributions that predate Test::Simple and Test::More. Back in the 'old days', a test assertion looked like this:

I was working with just such a test file this week and I would dearly have loved to see a message associated with each test.