Mash duplicates any sub-Hashes that you add to it and wraps them in a Mash. This allows for infinite chaining of nested Hashes within a Mash without modifying the object(s) that are passed into the Mash. When you subclass Mash, the subclass wraps any sub-Hashes in its own class. This preserves any extensions that you mixed into the Mash subclass and allows them to work within the sub-Hashes, in addition to the main containing Mash.

Value coercions, on the other hand, will coerce values based on the type of the value being inserted. This is useful if you are trying to build a Hash-like class that is self-propagating.