... the "(LIST)" pseudo-idiom does a pretty good job of getting people to a level where they can grasp what's really going on.

I find that explaining to people what's really going on from the start—rather than pretending that context is some strange and scary thing that you only learn after a decade of experience—is rather easy. After all, anyone whose native spoken language has subject-verb number agreement already understands it.

The notion that parentheses create some sort of first-class data structure known as a list is nonsensical in Perl, and it leads to strange misunderstandings and false cognates between other languages. Far better to avoid that mess altogether when the alternative is so much easier (and so much more accurate).