OK I went the seemingly cleanest route of exceptions. Now what has been one line of calling a function, became this bloat:

undef $@;
my @val = eval { do_stuff() };
if ($@) {
    if (ref $@ and $@->isa('SoftError')) {
        warn ${$@};    # SoftError object is a scalar ref with the mes
+sage
        return
    }
    else {
        die $@    # as if we had never caught it
    }
}
push @rv, @val;
[download]

What do you think?