The dumbass comment was for the person who threw in "use warnings;" without protecting for it. That's aimed at all those CPAN devs who have "use warnings;" in their tests, but not in their code. Running on older Perls is something I fully respect and understand why it happens - both PDF::Template and Excel::Template run perfectly fine on 5.005_03 and I think they'll run on 5.004 (though that's untested). I also know what I went through to get there.

As for it being a poor error message - that's from experience. I've gotten a lot of "Why is this breaking on machineX when it works on machineY?" as a consultant. A simple "use 5.006;" would've fixed everything. I view it as documenting assumptions through assertions.