I see where you're coming from with that, but I'm trying to take a class, then simply to specialise it in whatever way, ie, modified methods, or even new methods (although I doubt I'll be doing that).

I seem to be having a problem with this approach due to Class::Data::Inheritable and Class::Accessor

Those are both used in the base class for my 'initial' class to setup the constructor, etc.

those behaviours from the base class are present in the main class, but not in sub-classes when using the methods I've shown in my first example.