Nice post, and it turns out I agree with most of your points. When I said to spread it out to multiple lines, I was only referring to adding whitespace (I, too, hate throwaway variables), something like in this post. I like the fact that it separates the different actions a little more than usual.

Just keep in mind that something that's easily readable to the average programmer might be slightly different than something that's easily readable to someone with 7980 posts on Perlmonks. ;)