Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as dereferencing goes, in Perl 6 it should be implicit (which can be good or bad) so one should never have to type $foo.{bar}. The . will be unnecessary. That's OK (tm).

What I am opposed to is the use of . for method calls. Currently $object->method is quite distinct from $object->{attribute}. With the addition of properties (like $node{VALUE}.Found in Exegesis 2) how are we supposed to differentiate methods from other things?

There just doesn't seem to be enough reason to make this change. Sure it's just syntactic. But one of the great things about Perl is that one can generally tell exactly what one is looking at, as opposed to hunting through thousands of lines of code to find out if foo is type char or int.