I think I'll just always consider myself an amateur, (unless I'm working on my resume, in which case isn't everyone advanced? :)) After all, if theres only three levels, I'll never be just two levels below someone like merlyn no matter what skill set each level encompasses.

Although I don't know or care exactly what level I truly am, I do know that I can look back on code I've written not even a month prior and improve readability/maintainability/elegance etc... based on new concepts I've picked up. This confirms that I'm still learning and that's what matters.

As far as the code in I present to you... Horrible code! that node has almost nothing to do with lack of Perl knowledge and everything to do with lack of general programming knowledge. A complete Perl newbie with a good programming background would never have written such poorly laid out code even if they were his first lines of Perl.

OOP is considered an Advanced Topic in Perl Programming, so does not using OOP imply an Amateurish level of Perl knowledge?

Not using OOP doesn't imply an amateurish level of Perl knowledge at all, trust me I've seen some pretty amateurish OO code. Perhaps not knowing when to use OOP and when not to implies an amateurish knowledge of OOP however.