As one waiting for Perl6 myself, and presently entranced with the wonders of Ruby to the point of almost leaving the fold, here are my thoughts:

I think the unicode character operators are very very bad. While it maybe nice that "..." and the ellipses work as the same thing, it prevents code editors from searching on such things.

I think there are WAY too many operators (queue link to the table of operators). This is cool, but Perl5 ALREADY has a problem with newbies being able to read code written by uber-perl programmers (like myself :)). We're going to make it more obscure possibly, without adding clarity. I do like the freedom of expression, but we are going to create a lot of dialects with uber-TIMTOWDI.

I think the tendancy to have a lot of modifiers on declarations, etc, is confusing -- there is getting to be too much syntax to remember. Why is Perl5 cool? It's a minimalist language.

I too argree that better OO module support in the Perl5 standard distribution would be a good thing. (Things like Spiffy.pm, only Spiffier).

I want to see Python, Perl, and Ruby folks actively working on Parrot, not just Perl folks ... takeover in open source doesn't always work, design goals are different, etc.

That being said, I eagerly await the day I can try an official release. Yes, I'm not learning it until it's finalized ... as right now, I've got other toy languages to play with that I can ship, etc. Hopefully it will become a very clean, nice, language -- but it needs to be VERY mindful of the things it is getting wrong in the way to that clean-ness. I also think it may have bitten off more than it can chew and the long development time may be a software process problem.