To paraphrase the leader of a well-known open source software project: "Software is evolution, not intelligent design". The existence of several similar solutions to the same problem is not necessarily bad, it allows for in-depth exploration of a problem-space and means that users can use a solution that's most to their liking. I know I've personally (for what I considered to be good reasons) chosen Template::Toolkit over HTML::Mason and vice versa for different projects. And just look how many attempts (some by very well-respected authors) there were to devise a better object system for Perl 5 until one finally emerged that seems to be best-fit for most people.

This is not to say that your goal of collaboration is not a laudable one! Of course the (free software|Perl)? world would be a better place if more people put their ego aside and tried to work together rather than being king of their own castle. I just wanted to point out that TIMTOWDI is a good thing in it's own right.

<pet rant>The one thing that does occasionally bug me about CPAN is the fact that module namespace is equivalent to functionality. Thus, if I'm the first person to think of writing Foo::Frobnicate I will always remain the author of the authoritative module on the subject. Even if the frobnicator incarnate later comes along to write his own (much better) module, he'll have to call it Foo::Frobnicate::Better or something equally stupid. I hope the Perl 6 people manage to better separate this (even though I haste to admit that I have absolutely no bloody idea what a "better" way could be).</pr>