Here's a few reasons I don't like this:

• I can't return anything but errors (For one thing, I like to assign a meaningful variable name to the output to help explain the purpose of the subroutine)
• The truth value of a subroutine is counter intuitive (The opposite of perl's built-in functions)
• I still have the unreadability of mixing lots of technical error gunk with procedural code.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway :)