I think it's a mistake to confuse "experimental" as a synonym for "doesn't work properly yet".

For me experimental means:

1. Might have bugs - probably not true for :lvalue, the current implementation seems pretty solid
2. Might change in a non-upward compatable manner - more likely for :lvalue if it is going to be of much use
3. Might not be the "right" way of doing it - in my opinion the current :lvalue opens up your object implementation details far to much and is not the "right" way :-)

I would not use :lvalue in production code because of (2) and (3). See lvalue considered harmful... where I go into this in more boring detail :-), and a suggestion for how I would like it to work.

One of the benefits of using subroutines instead of direct hash access is that you can catch typos easily. If you assign to $self->{elemnent} you're missing the mark quietly, but a call to $self->elemnent will outright fail.

I agree, but I think the disadvantages of :lvalue more than outweigh this advantage (and there are other ways to get around typos - e.g. inside out objects or Tie::SecureHash.)