I'm not saying that it confuses me. I'm saying that I use it as a flag to myself (or whoever is editing my code). Single quotes denote a string with no variable interpolation or special escape sequences. It seems obvious and useful to me.

And, yes, I sometimes have to change quote characters when I'm editing code. I see that as part of keeping the code as readable as possible.

I'm glad to see that Damian Conway agrees with me (see section 4.1 of Perl Best Practices).