Ok, building and de-refrencing large data structures often gets to be difficult. for arrays-of-arrays, i use the following :

  bless { some_scalar        => "blah",
          another_scalar     => "blah",
          some_array         => [],
          an_array_of_arrays => [[1,2,3]["a","b","c"]],
         },$class
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Now, from a design side this would look like :

    $b = $object->{an_array_of_arrays}->[1][1]; 
    # $b has "b"
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This is the anonymous array version. You were close with the ref version, with one change. you can do :

# old
an_array_of_arrays => $ref_to_array1[$ref_to_array2],

# new
an_array_of_arrays => [$ref_to_array1,$ref_to_array2],
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Hope that helps.