Larry Wall is a linguist. I'm sure there has to be some reasoning behind making the language more complex. Do you know of a text by him explaining why there are two kind of writing the same operators? And why using non ASCII characters?
It's kind of obvious the reasoning behind it... The unicode is the mathematical or good choice for the operator character, but the majority of people have no idea how to type it. I have yet to see a keyboard with most of the unicode maths operators on.
No risk, no fun.