Perl6 will be much further from anything a novice Perl programmer has encountered in other languages than Perl5

True. Yet the majority of those features are optional; what little muckin' about I've done with Perl6 has started from my Perl5 experience, and you can craft what's basically pared-down Perl5 code in Perl6. I think you overstate the effects of many (not all) of the new additions, in terms of programmer impact.

Besides, the entire world doesn't use ".". Java does

The simple point is that the majority of OO code written uses the period.