The balkanization of built-in functions that are truly special cases of a general case is against any philosophical underpinnings that Perl follows. I am not saying it's perfect, but it is highly resistant to becoming a tower of babble. If that's your interest (not accusing you of being malicious), there are more fruitful avenues to attack Perl

I respectfully disagree. Perl philosophy states that there should be shortcuts for special cases if they are used often. That's the idea behind suffix conditionals (  return if (index($line,'EOL')>-1) ) and bash-style if statement (($debug) && say line; )

You also are missing the idea. My suggestion is that we can enhance the power of Perl by treating single quoted string differently from regex in split. And do this without adding to balkanization.

Balkanization of built-ins is generally what Python got having two different functions. Perl can avoid this providing the same functionality with a single function. That's the idea.

And my point is that this particular change requires minimal work in interpreter as it already treats ' ' in a special way (AWK way).

So this is a suggestion for improving the language, not for balkanization, IMHO. And intuitively it is logical as people understand (and expect) the difference in behavior between single quoted literals and regex in split. So, in a way, the current situation can be viewed as a bug, which became a feature.