Personally I love confess, so much so that I export it by default in Moose. I understand the argument that stack traces are ugly, but when I have a fatal error, I want as much information as possible at that very moment so I don't have to go back and try and reproduce the error and other such hoop-jumping-through stuff.

In some cases I think using die/croak is okay, but in a library I think it can be frustrating. A good stack trace (and the occasional bit of source diving) will almost always tell me who is causing the error (me or the library). Whereas a die/croak means I have to do my own stack tracing to find the path from my code to the error, and that is tedious even in the cleanest code. Some might say that really good error messages will accomplish all this without needing a stack trace, but IMO that is just delusional.

As for the dependency issue, its a noop, Carp is in the core.

Oh yeah, just to play devil's advocate, there is always Carp::Always.