> Except now, I have two ways of working with Perl's collections, two separate sets of sigils, and all because I wanted to pass two collections into a function and Perl treats function arguments as a collection, and Perl implicitly flattens collections.

It's not really two sets of sigils, it's two concepts: "collection", and "pointer to collection". I guess coming from C that didn't bother me too much—once it sunk that references were just (safe) pointers, using them works almost exactly the same:

    int a = 1, *b=&a, **c=&b, ***d=&c;
    printf("%d %d %d %d\n", a, *b, **c, ***d);

    my $a = 1; my $b=\$a; my $c=\$b; my $d=\$c;
    printf("%d %d %d %d\n", $a, $$b, $$$c, $$$$d);

Perl even stole C's pointer syntax to make working with collections nice:

    my $a = [1,2,3];
    printf("%d\n", $a->[0]);