I would suggest to use wantarray. Perhaps:

sub my_get_data_section {
  my $section = shift;
  my $data    = Data::Section::Simple::get_data_section($section);
  # probably error handling here...
  return wantarray ? split("\n", $data) : $data;
}

my $line  = my_get_data_section( $section );
my @lines = my_get_data_section( $section );
[download]

You could also ask the author to support this feature.
Another option would be to overwrite Data::Section::Simple::get_data_section() with the implementation of my_get_data_section(), but that trick is probably quite dirty from a software engineering point of view...