On the other hand, pseudo-hashes seem to be evil, the docs warn about their imminent removal from Perl

They have been removed from 5.10. On the other hand, 5.10 adds support for field hashes, which in turn are used for Inside Out objects, which is what all the cool kids are using these days.

The main thing to remember about field hashes, if you haven't heard about them, is that they allow references to be used as hash keys in an efficient manner. (Yes, there are modules that let you do this already, but the performance stinks).