If you think that parentheses should only indicate precedence, then you have clearly never experienced any of the Lisp family of languages.

For me after I learned what context was I made the decision that in my code the callee was responsible for working in either list or scalar context, and then it was the caller's job to not play games with it. Having somewhere to place that responsibility has made consistent handling of it work out quite well.

But yes, this feature is one that Perl programmers far too often gloss over, and it is so key to the language that they are really missing something if they don't understand it.