Good point. I like reverse sort {$a <=> $b} @unsorted for readability/maintenance.
I think I'd probably use it, but is it really true that it executes just as quickly?
Doesn't reverse have to re-evaluate the list given to it before executing?
This would mean are evaluating the contents of the unsorted list twice: once to perform an ascending sort and again to perform a reverse.

I do a lot of large batch database processing, and I'm fond of anything which is more efficient. If I had to execute the sort a few million times in a loop or give it an extremely large list such as all rows in my database, I could see the single sort approach being more efficient. Please let me know if I'm missing some, but in the meantime I'm off to use Benchmark to try this out.