Fair enough. I did go a little overboard in the name of completeness. IT just boils down to actually understanding what a reference is in Perl (which is something that needs to be done for anything non-amateur), and then realizing there's one -> or not depending on if it's a reference (and doing the wrong thing will fail, not do weird stuff).

Personally, I like that it forces you to be aware that this data structure is likely in use somewhere else as well, and your changes may not be local (which is true of deeper levels regardless).