It made be curious enough to ask the author himself for clarification wrt code vs docs. Here's part of Johans reply to me:

> /me
> According to my reading of the 2.38 docs however, the --list option
> should have eaten -v as well, as it states that args can start with
> - or --. Which I'd take to mean that all further elements in @ARGV
> are eaten by --list.

/johan
Args can start with -/-- only if mandatory. list=s@{,} allows for
many arguments, but does not require them. list=s@{,4} would *require*
4 arguments and eat -/-- args if necessary.

He also pointed me to !FINISH to help with stopping option parsing early. Together with ::Long's option aliasing, this should suffice to replace some of my looping thru @ARGV to massage arguments before getopt :).

Thanx to Johan & Beth for her excellent example above!