It's absolutely not true that Rakudo/JVM is 40x faster than Rakudo/Parrot in the general case. (That's just for a particular run of Solomon's program.) Indeed it's been roughly 50/50 slower/faster on the benchmarks I've seen. The plan at the moment is to get the JVM port to match Parrot feature-wise and then look at optimizing it. (And I think MoarVM will get more optimization attention than the JVM.)

If Rakudo/JVM does get to be 40x faster than Parrot in the general case, it would be about 2x or 3x slower than Perl 5. (And one would then be able to use features such as native types to outperform Perl 5 for some work.) Imo that would indeed be an achievement, regardless of whether it took 13 or 15 years to get there. Not an achievement to brag about outside the Perl community, of course, but clearly of interest here at the monastery.

Imo, if Parrot had been "designed specifically for", or even sufficiently for, Rakudo, then Rakudo would have reached 6.0.0 as Rakudo/Parrot, MoarVM would not exist, and the JVM port would either not exist or be a lot less tactically important.

(Edit: added italics and parens to clarify.)