Would you care to share some of these realizations?

It's extremely easy to pick up poor practices in Perl5 that make the language appear to be unsound even though it can be used extremely elegantly.

You might want to have a look at the libraries that are part of Task::Kensho to get a better feel for how 21st century perl is supposed to be written - at the very least, you might find some ideas to steal for your "sound" language of choice :)