I feel like the Gods at perlmonks are looking down on me telling me I suck
No one thinks you suck and this is not a pro v amateur question. It’s a matter of remote help and effort involved. If you have a 10,000 line script with homemade modules all without strict or warnings and you have an error and come here to ask: Why is it broken? No one is likely to help because it could be 100,000 things and except in very lucky or obvious circumstances, it will be painful to figure out, if not impossible, without seeing all the code.
use strict; protects you and makes getting free, professional help eas(y|ier) for the professional which also makes it more likely to happen. I think you can see the difference between saying: Please help me, it will probably be easy for you and Please help me, it might be impossible or take several hours of your time. That’s where the, sometimes hostile, push-back against eschewing strict originates.
