[jandrese]

This seems like a whole lot of bending over backwards to avoid breaking a handful of edge cases that could be cleaned up on their own without too much drama.

I would kind of prefer the features be enabled by default if you use a high enough version and if a module breaks you just fix it or dial back the version number at the top of your script until it is fixed.

But I'd also run all of the test suites on CPAN against every new feature that comes out and fixing or at least tagging anything that breaks. Maybe even list a "maximum tested version number" for each module and emit a warning if you exceed it.

[sigzero]

The majority didn't want the breaking possibility so it won out. It was discussed at length.