So, how would you use Moose today?

I probably wouldn't. Mouse maybe, but not Moose. Mostly because it carries a lot of complexity under the covers in order to provide features--like deep introspection--that I do not see the benefit of.

And even though that complexity is hidden from me, I know it is still there and I must carry its overhead though I'll never benefit from it. And for the type of code I mostly write these days, that overhead is significant.

So how do you declare your has's to create per-instance storage, for internal use only?

As I understand it, if you use is bare, then you get no accessors and no warnings.

I'm not into the bondage and discipline thing. Indeed, in part it was the complexity of the whole private/public/friend thing that caused me to arrive at a considerable distaste for C++. (There are other reasons also, but that was one.) So when I feel the need for OO in Perl, I'm perfectly happy to construct mine around blessed refs manually.

With no attribute accessors at all--public or private. '_'s to indicate private methods are sufficient for my purposes. And initialisation done by the constructor from whatever form of input makes most sense. Eg. If the data that is used to initialise an object is read from an external source as text, then either that text gets passed to the constructor, or for mass instantiation, an open file handle.

Declarative syntax is a nice to have, but only if it retains sufficient control to allow me to decide (and only pay for) those features I want/need.

As I rarely write assessors for my attributes, I've never felt the burden of doing so, so don't need auto-generation. And As I only validate parameters when they transition the public/private boundary--not every time an attribute gets written--the use of declarative validation is also superfluous.