I must agree that Perl is fun, but hardly satisfying. The Perl I write is used to assist me in managing a WAN that hosts a number of Data Warehouses. I can add users, groups, audit file permissions, web logs, event logs, search newsgroups, and filter my email all with perl. My sense of satisfaction comes from writing a program that does yet another of my many repetitive tasks. I code, run, occasionally refactor after reading a Perlmonks post that shows me "yet another way to do it", and derive my satisfaction from knowing that I'm getting lazier and lazier every day. My code is full of commented out lines that bear testimony to having found a better way, (or just sometimes a way that works), and I find that less than satisfying. I want to clean it up, but maybe I'll have to write "yet another program" to do just that.
Now that is satisfying.