What would you think if a newer version of compiler/interpreter made your code fininsh in one day rather than in two minutes? I'm not really blaming anybody in the Perl community (it's not like I'm looking for a refund as such ;) ); if I were to blame somebody, I'd first blame myself for choosing Perl and then whoever wrote the code for not having shown more command in programming.
Anyway, what really matters to me is that now the code works as expected and overall, all my Perl programs run 20% faster under Perl 5.8.5, which really worths it all in the end. But what if it didn't... :D