Age in and on itself isn't an indicator of quality. It's true that development in old projects can slow down[1], but this is by no means necessarily true, and young projects in turn can be lacking, e.g. in maturity, code quality, features and so on. I'd advise against judging projects by their age.

Perl 5, for what it's worth is undergoing active and exciting development; just check the perldeltas for the latest versions.

I also feel I should take up the cudgels for CPAN. You talk about CPAN as if it's a bad thing, but the opposite is true; CPAN is an extremely valuable part of the Perl ecosystem. CPAN allows you to (fairly) easily share the fruits of your labor, and benefit from others' in turn; as such CPAN is a large part of what has made Perl a community, rather than just a language.

Sometimes there's several competing modules on CPAN, but that too is a good thing. After all, isn't TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) one of Perl's mottos? Competition is good, and the best solution will eventually win out. In fact universally-useful, well-maintained CPAN modules can be bundled into the Perl code, and are.

And if no module wins out, and if different people keep on using different modules, then those modules obviously fill different niches. There's room for more than one module for any given task on CPAN anyway, and people being able to scratch their particular itches and getting their jobs done with a minimum of fuss is what I'd call a success.

1. Whether that is a sign of stagnation, or simply conversion on the "Golden Code", is another question as well. TeX (i.e. core TeX itself, not the surrounding ecosystem) is perhaps the best example of the latter, a project that's not seeing much development anymore because it's approaching perfection.