But the problems is, is that this confuses folks.

That's because a list is not a first-class data structure in Perl. There's a perfectly good and accurate name for the first-class indexed aggregate data structure in Perl. That name is "array". A list is something different. If you conflate the two, you will confuse people. They will start to think that parentheses create lists instead of grouping syntactic elements to disambiguate operator precedence. They may believe that operators which operate on lists will operate only on arrays, and that those operators do not introduce list context to their operands.

Sloppy terminology produces sloppy understanding.