(With all the caveats of local and symboltable hacking, of course.)

Indeed. In fact this is a hack. Granted, a nice hack, but as I wrote, not that it is impossible to work around the lack of lexically scoped named subs, it's possible and even easy. We still simply lack them and I would feel comfortable having them instead. I would just be interested to know whether there's some major technical difficulty in this sense...