A very large proportion of the replies you have received in this thread are from people who put a high value on writing maintainable code. "maintainable" is short hand for code that is written to be understood and maintained with minimum effort over long periods of time and by different programmers of mixed ability. There is a strong correlation with your stance of "defensive programming" ... against over-complexity as well as arbitrary formatting. None of us are arguing with that stance. We are arguing with the JavaScript semicolon that you would like introduced based on a personal whim in a context of limited understanding of Perl syntax and idiomatic use.

Personally I use an editor that has an on demand pretty printer which I use frequently. The pretty printer does very little work because I manually format my code as I go and almost always that is how the pretty printer will format it. I do this precisely to ensure my code is not overly complex and is maintainable. I do this in all the languages that I use and the hardest languages to do that in are Python, VBScript and JavaScript because of the way they deal with semi-colons.

Oh, and in case it is of interest, dave_the_m is one of the current maintainers of Perl. He is in a great position to know how the nuts and bolts of an optional semi-colon change might be made and has a great understanding of how Perl is commonly used. Both give him something of a position of authority in determining the utility of such a change.