Didn't even see that, but oddly, perl is OK with three dots. I'll change it up to ensure no other side effects.
http://codepad.org/7A83V6CT
The challenge/solution I originally posted I ended up re-approaching and iterating the $armor_list as an array, and then grabbing the hash data as seen on the bottom example.
My only snag now is that I'm trying to transfer the %itemcount hash to plugin::check_handin() via another function, plugin::velious_armor_handin() and for some reason, passing the variable from function to function is not doing pointer refs. May end up picking up a programming book about perl, but figured perl experts can peek and be like "Do X instead of Y", and save me a ton of time of fiddling and google research that inevitably is probably a 2 line fix.