If you're coming back to perl, read Modern Perl. Then learn Moose and its ecosystem. That will get you about 90% of the way to writing good, maintainable perl. :)
some systems, such as human and computer languages, contain a minimum amount of complexity, and that attempting to "push down" the complexity of such a system in one place will invariably cause complexity to "pop up" elsewhere.
Take for example the given-when syntax in Perl - http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/given.html
It really works hard enough to work as a switch statement with smart matching - http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html#Switch-statements with the adapting to the user intention.
I have always wondered how the Perl will evolve in the future. I see it will look more and more like Perl 6 adding features to make the magic look spectacular and amazing. We are already seeing Moose and Moosex and various other modules developed using Devel::Declare and the amazing stuff that they can do.
By working to match the user intention, the programmer generally can build the program in his head even while he is imagining the features.
Overall the greatest power of Perl that I have seen is, You can start your text editor and really build things as you think. Unlike many languages where you need a IDE which 100's of MB's heavy or you have to continually bother dealing with piles and piles of verbose code which often requires hours and hours of effort figure out what's happening underneath the layers.
I came to the Perl party a pretty late. But Perl is so much like Emacs. Once you learn it well the productivity gains are exponential.
Once you are familiar with the language to a level. The program just flows out naturally even as your thinking. And yes to mention somethings in Perl make it so easy for that happen is really Larry's genius to build such a thing.
This is also what enables a person to write useful applications in very little time, while avoiding most of the cruft traditional languages have.
The surprising thing is, most people don't know about this. But when they first encounter it literally hits you like a lifelong addiction.
I do a lot of innovation at $dayjob and most of the times people think I'm a genius or super productive. But, its only that Perl enables me to do stuff so quickly it often looks like magic to people around.