I'm pretty new to Perl, but its key attraction is how much you can do with how little. I think Perl loses a lot of its advantage when you a start writing large chunks of code with it.

To misquote a little: Easy things are quick and hard things are possible. Although hard things are possible, they may take a long time and be troublesome to get right and to maintain. Other languages that provide more type safety may prove better in the long run than Perl for "hard" or large projects.

Good programmers can write good code in pretty much any language. Bad programmers write bad code in any language. Average programmers who are trying really benefit from the discipline imposed by some of the heavy duty general purpose languages like C++.

So, I don't think "standard Perl" is likely to be a crippled Perl. It would be nice for use strict; use warnings; to be default behaviour (for script, but not for one-liners) to make it harder for "bad programmers" to write bad code. Perl should continue to make easy things easy (and quick) - hard things are likely to be hard no matter how you do it.