Truth to tell, my personal opinion is that the entire idea of context in Perl is an interesting experiment in language design that other languages have wisely decided not to borrow...

Im on the other side on this one for sure. Context is one my favorite things in perl. Sure occassionally I get betting by it one way or another, but overall I think its a great thing.

Therefore I am interested in which of the above (or other variations of your choice) people think is a good default behaviour to standardize on..and more importantly why.

Im definately in the don't standardize camp. I would say that part of the artistry of perl is choosing things like this. Its like naming functions. To borrow a chess metaphor, a newbie perl programmer doesnt think about names or context at all. An experienced one deliberates on such things for ages before deciding on the right behaviour, and a grandmaster just picks a name and behaviour and it makes sense. The whole point here is convenience. Does the code read well in its various usages, is the behaviour intuitive and easy to assimilate. Or does it read like gobbleygook and trip you up all the time?

Only experience, and understanding of the usage context (using context at the human level and not perl level) will determine what behaviour is sensible.

I will say however that the whole

return wantarray ? @array : \@ref
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idea doesnt seem like a clean solution. I used to do it a fair bit but I found it trips you up too often. Instead I almost always simply return the reference for things like this. In other scenarios I often make the results vary based on wantarrays status. For instance ive done stuff like this on many an occassion:

sub get_rec {
  my $self=shift;
  print(join ",",@$self),return unless defined wantarray;
  return wantarray ? @$self : join(",",@$self);
}
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Anyway, i would say that context is a bit like a rich cake. A little bit goes a long way, and too much is just awful. But none is even worse. :-)