Be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you emit.

Perhaps the codebases we work with are quite different, but almost every case I've encountered of people passing the "wrong" number of arguments arose because someone changed the signature of some subroutine and neglected to hunt down every use of it.

Of course, one response to that is "don't do that", which is certainly valid to some extent. However, with a sufficiently large codebase, and a sufficiently large number of developers with mixed skills and experience, and a language like Perl where tracking down all uses can be challenging to the best of us, there may be something to be said for paranoia.

If I cannot pass the foo parameter in (to be silently ignored if necessary), that's a sign of bad assumptions.

Your assumption that subroutines silently ignore unknown arguments is the bad assumption. Nothing says this is the rule.

If it's for forwards- or backwards-compatibility then it's not unknown extra arguments. They're there for a reason and the module author is aware of this. Future problems won't arise for you adding those arguments. For my issues with this, see Re^2: Use method/function signatures with Perl.

As for dispatches (like your example with rendering engines), you can take care of this with very little code changes. In your dispatch table (if you have one -- otherwise create one) add which parameters that should be passed (or which shouldn't be passsed, or whichever way suits your problem) and then pass just those parameters. This is trivial to implement for someone like you. For example, a simple draft to illustrate my solution code-wise can look like

sub foo { print "foo: @_\n" }
sub bar { print "bar: @_\n" }

sub safe_dispatch {
    my ($dispatch, $name, $params) = @_;

    my ($code, @keys) = @{$dispatch->{$name}};
    my @params = map { $_ => $params->{$_} }
                 grep { exists $params->{$_} }
                 @keys;
    return $code->(@params);
}

my %dispatch = (
    foo => [ \&foo, qw/ foo common / ],
    bar => [ \&bar, qw/ bar common / ],
);

my %params = (
    foo => 1,
    bar => 1,
    common => 1,
);

safe_dispatch(\%dispatch, $_, \%params)
    for qw/ foo bar /;

__END__
foo: foo 1 common 1
bar: bar 1 common 1
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All I've changed from a trivial dispatch is added parameter names in the dispatch table, and use a subroutine instead of $dispatch{$name}->(%params) which typically would be used.

This approach could easily be tweaked for most other situations and similar problems. I admit there might be cases where this could be cumbersome but for typical use I think it's trivial to get around your problem.

A little code with a great benefit, the way I see it. (See Re^2: Use method/function signatures with Perl for the benefit.)

ihb

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