I don't feel an overwhelming need to do anything with regards to auto-vivification as I don't recall it ever being an major issue in any of my programs. In fact, if I see auto-vivification in my data set, that triggers a voice in my head that says "Ah, I abused a reference somewhere!" The only times I have ever had to really struggle with it is when others have coded bizarre, twisted, incorrect, algorithms and then, complained about perl creating spurious data elements when, in fact, perl was merely trying to save them from themselves.

If you feel an overwhelming need to retool auto-vivification then please, feel free to come up with an implementation and push it up to the perldev community.