Sepia has come a long ways since your review. Myself, I've always found the Perl debugger more painful than print statements, and didn't discover gud's perl debugger function until I had become used to using Sepia and print. Besides, what I am aiming for with Sepia is not an improved debugger, but a Lisp-style development model for Perl, where you experiment at the prompt, and errors give you a prompt to play with.

Anyways, the point of my post was that you might as well always run with some debugging enabled, since it costs nothing and lets you diagnose problems without having to come up with test cases to reproduce them.