And the use of contrived examples to deprecate things that work perfectly well in normal situations just seems like bad karma.

It's not the normal situations that worry me in programming.

For what it's worth, I argued for removing the indirect object syntax entirely from Perl 6, but can live with the postfix indirect object disambiguation marker which renders the parsing ambiguities moot. The syntax bothers me, but the potential for non-deterministic code is the real problem with the syntax in Perl 5. Perl 6 fixes that, so what's left is merely a matter of style, for which Perl allows more than one way to do it.

Update: Disambiguated my second paragraph.