God, I hate this stupid war. Especially when it comes to Perl, if for no other reason than the existence of Perl::Tidy makes conforming to either choice a simple matter.

Or, as the OP says:

everyone with a decent modern editor can have their cake and eat it too.

Every reasonably modern editor can look at code written in either a space-indent style or a tab-indent style and present it in a sensible way. The only thing that really matters is that you preserve the existing style of code you edit to make for readable diffs. And with modern editors and perltidy, this is a very simple exercise.

(I admit, I have a preference for tabs: it's based on my own personal pedantry that when I press tab, damnit, I want a tab and not an interpolated set of spaces. But I clearly don't possess enough hubris, as I will simply use whatever style the code I'm working on embodies.)