This is an unfortunate reality that has been true for years. Other languages have long had better and more-complete web services stacks for ages, largely because those languages have had commercial support. Microsoft has a vested interest in C# having a thorough SOAP/WSDL/etc. library available, as do Sun and IBM with regards to Java.

Perl, on the other hand, has never really had that degree of backing. Oh, there are plenty of companies with commercial interest in Perl, many (most?) of which have made contributions-- the funding that Ticketmaster poured in to the advancement of mod_perl is a great example of this, as well as the period of time Fotango was paying Leon Brocard to basically hack on big-P Perl.

But lower-level toolkits often get to a point where they're "good-enough" for the problem the author needs to solve, then the author has to go on to a new problem, Usually because that is what the author gets paid to do-- solve problems for whomever is writing the paycheck. SOAP::Lite is hardly alone in this-- the original SOAP package didn't get nearly as far in terms of functionality before it stopped being updated. I wrote my XML-RPC stack (RPC::XML) because Frontier::RPC2 wasn't being updated. And to be fair, I haven't had the bandwidth to keep up the pace on that project as much as I would like to.

Perl will have web service tools that are on par with Java and C# when someone has the money to invest in their development. That may be in the form of having enough personal wealth to go jobless for a year or so, or it may be a company that, like Ticketmaster and Fotango, feels that it is in their commercial interest to fund the work and give back to the Perl community.

(As an aside, there are a lot of things about SOAP::Lite that I would do differently, though that doesn't mean my version would be better. But if I had the time, or won the lottery, I would love to start a SOAP/WSDL/general webservices stack project. Alas, I don't have the time and I never get around to buying lottery tickets.)