Is it java that is scaring away quality perl people, or is Perl just not that viable a solution for company needs?

It seems that here at least, Perl is a very expensive solution, because Java programmers are a dime a dozen.

Hmm. I'm curious to know what your job requirements look like. I would guess that you're saying you want someone with 5 years of Perl experience. The problem with this sort of approach to hiring someone to work on a perl application is that one year of Perl experience can mean vastly different things to different people. I know people who say they have used Perl for 6 years, and yet they are unaware of many of the features and caveats of Perl which I learned in my first year.

In my recent experience applying for jobs, very few of the posters who say they want someone with lots of Perl experience really mean that you need to know Perl that well. Does a sysadmin who has used Perl for 10 years really know it as well as a hacker who has used it for one?

Good problem-solvers have always been in short supply. The trouble is that you can't identify them if you don't give them a problem to solve. If you're not looking for hackers who can identify and solve a completely different problem than the one you thought you had, you might as well just hire a slew of *++ programmers and hand them a spec.

BTW, I'm self-taught in Perl and my BS is not in CS. My only formal CS education is one semester of Fortran. This doesn't stop me from understanding OO methodology, only from getting a job at a place where they think this requires a CS degree.