Pointer Syntax? What? I'm not trying to be an ass here, but I'm confused as how you could have a decade of Perl use up your sleeve and not realise Perl has no pointers. It has references, perhaps, and perhaps I'm just being a semantic pedant, but they're quite different to me.

Then again, I actually find C/C++ pointer tracking and memory allocation daunting, so perhaps that is why I find Perl references more intuitive than not?

In my estimation you can make Perl harder to work with if you try, but you can also make it easier. ie: regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself, you can do things the hard way with objects, or you can use something like CPAN and get a module that makes this easy ( Moose is my favourite ).

Sure, Perl is perhaps hard for people, I'll give you that, but it doesn't have to be.