I have the opposite problem... I find perl's data structures so ridiculously easy to write that I can quickly build up arrays of hashes of arrays of (ad infinitum) while in the "flow". Throw in the ability to actually get references to things, and control de-referencing of things, and I've never felt perl has stopped me (for better or worse!) from doing anything with data structures.

    $ perl -E 'my $f=[[{X=>{Y=>["FOO"]}}]]; say $f->[0][0]{X}{Y}[0];my $g=$f->[0][0]{X}{Y}; say $g->[0]'
    FOO
    FOO

Seems pretty trivial.

Yeah now try iterating. What used to get me is for some types $ is used only when de-referencing. It was terrible trying to track those errors down. Basically I loved perl but the language has a terrible design, inexcusable really. There was essentially no point in having types, it took all the worst parts of C and then reinvented them slightly differently with new syntax, twice per datatype. Glad to be rid of it.