Same with Perl, if you are not willing to do some digging in, getting your hands dirty, testing, comparing, reading, learning, you won't understand why Perl is good at all, and why its better than "the other programming language" that you think so much of.
I agree, you should be willing to do those things. But maybe not on day 1 (or whatever) of coming to Perl from another language. It might be a culture shock for those people, and if we can (without too much trouble) I think we (as a community) should help ease them into it.