There's a time and place for everything. For some functions, it makes sense to accept an ordered paramenter list. For others, it makes sense to accept a list of key/value pairs. And sometimes, it's useful to pass around an anomyous hash by reference, as you've suggested.
Saying there's exactly one right way to do it is an open invitation to a holy war. As long as you understand the benefits and tradeoffs of each method, you'll do fine. Blind adherance to an arbitrary rule such as "never write a function that takes more than one argument" is just silly.
MeowChow
s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print