Man, chaoticset, watching you pick up Perl is like watching myself a few years back. :) I could tell you were really learning The Perl Way in the entry you titled "Trial By Accident" where you mentioned you learned you could put arrays in hashes. Now you're thinking Perl!
By the way, many cases where you want to access an array with a subscript are better handled with push, foreach, etc. When you find that you're not using array subscripts much anymore (and when the few situations where you have to really pain you), then you are truly thinking The Perl Way.
Thanks for the narration; keep us posted. And welcome!
