That used to bother me, too. use vars came along, and then the our keyword fixes the problem. Care to tell us (on another thread, if need be) what you find wrong with our "even after upgrading"?
Comment on Re: Re (tilly) 1: order of strict and package
I already explained at Why is 'our' good?. Basically there is nothing that our does that I don't think can be done better another way.
Beyond that I avoid introducing gratuitous backwards compatibility issues unless I see a significant gain from the new feature. I simply do not see that in our.