OK. I was able to find a little time to do some "number hunting" (find real data to support/debunk (m)any of the "facts" being thrown about in this thread). Here's the best info I was able to obtain:

CPAN Authors
YEAR	AUTHORS
1995	58
1996	121
1997	183
1998	306
1999	441
2000	590
2001	761
2002	994
2003	1207
2004	1261
2005	1303
2006	1380
2007	1447
2008	1573
2009	1631
2010	1655
2011	1671
2012	1758
2013	1736

Shows a drop of 22, from 2012 to 2013. Does this reveal an alarming trend?

Another interesting statistic is that an Author by the name of tobyink appears to be ranked "3", on the scale of "100 Most Contributing Authors". I could swear I've heard that name before, somewhere. :)

Well, for what it's worth. That's the best/most revealing data I could come up with.

--Chris

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;