I think that in Perl 6, .print outputs the stringification, while .say outputs the gist of a value, which is something more suitable for debugging/inspecting, as it returns something informative for the structure.

Please note that this is a factoid I think I picked up during one of the Perl 6 talks. I have not used it myself and have very little active experience in running Perl 6 code.

I find your approach of using Inline::Perl5 very interesting and think it's a good bridge to start moving a task that exists as a program in Perl 5 partially over to Perl 6 while not being hampered by the lack of Perl 6 modules or unknown APIs.