in reply to In need of a Dumper that has no pretentions to being anything else.
You can set $Data::Dumper::Deepcopy = 1 and Data::Dumper will dump the full contents even if they are just a copy of some other part of the structure already dumped. The only exception is if a structure contains a reference to itself, then it has to show a variable, otherwise it would loop forever.
I wouldn't worry about the memory use of Data::Dumper.
In Section
Seekers of Perl Wisdom