I'd be glad to use pod as defined. Point me at a definition. perlsyn contradicts itself.

There are two sides to pod. What defines a block of documentation for the Perl interpreter to ignore, and the language of pod itself which interpretes the content of such blocks.

The blank lines are unnecessary in the Perl context. It is ludicrous for Perl to check the validity of your pod when you wish to run your program.

Are there other plans for the "expecting statement got \n=bareword construct?   If not, why break things?¹ Why shouldn't Perl be able to create pod blocks that are null in the pod language? That is hot.

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¹ Apologies to whomever was playing with operators assigning to an implied $_ by default.