I think you make a good case for the bad influence of "golf" on the ability of Perl coders to write maintainable code, which I'm certain is not something you want to do.

Yes. This reminds me of Twenty20 versus one-day versus test cricket or blitz (five-minute) versus traditional (five hour) tournament chess. Playing too much Twenty20/one-day cricket can be poor preparation for a test series, just as playing too much blitz chess can be poor preparation for a traditional chess tournament. To which I will add that playing too much golf can be poor preparation for traditional coding. :-)

In my defence, I always follow the Perl Best Practices "Always unpack @_ first" advice for non-trivial subroutines. It's just that these two are so trivial, I couldn't resist writing them as one-liners.