The arguments in favor of Perl largely favor writability of code over readability. Code needs to be read, and most importantly understood, many more times than it is written, which is the whole reason Perl has fallen out of favor.

Elastic tabstops look interesting, but they won't solve any user experience problems until all major editors support them.

Using actual characters instead of substitutes like >= makes sense, except when I look down at my keyboard and try and imagine where all the extra buttons would go. I suppose you could still type the substitute and your editor could convert them to the actual symbols (LaTeX modes in emacs do something like this for you), but you'd have to get all editors to use the same substitutes to prevent another usability nightmare.