That's just cruel!

First off, that made me laugh. :-)

But, it also serves a few very important purposes.

1. It's opensource for a reason. Leverage that.
2. param() is one of the most complicated methods in CGI, for a reason - it does a gazillion things. Replicating that isn't simple and it shouldn't be seen as simple.
3. Lincoln's code is actually quite good. It's the problemspace that sucks. Newbies could do with a worse teacher of style and readability.
4. Client bugs suck. There's a ton of code in there to deal with browser incompatibilities. Newbies need to be smacked in the face about that, and often.

There is method to my cruelty.

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My criteria for good software:

1. Does it work?
2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Lincoln's code is actually quite good.

Except for self_or_default() which is clever but not clear in terms of interface and that hand-rolled autoloading mess (private methods are in the code segment and public methods are in the data segment) which makes debugging nearly impossible for almost everything you want.