I'm not sure if Joey's aware of this or not, but reading the code of e.g. Ikiwiki.pm [1] there's a very clear reason why it's a little hard to work with, and this has nothing to do with Perl.

The code looks superficially clean, particularly also because it appears to follow a consistent formatting standard; however it violates DRY a lot and features high levels of redundancy and repetition, making it not so much hard, but exhausting to read through. It looks a little like the kind of code i see in "enterprise java solutions".

[1] http://source.ikiwiki.branchable.com/?p=source.git;a=blob;f=...