Well you're asking in the right place, but I'm not the right person to give you a solid answer. Perhaps the gods will chip in. A theory, communities are built, the builders get older and often have less time to spare due to family or other commitments. As you progress in your working life generally more is asked of you, leaving you less time to spare. From the links I gave you, the framework in use here was forked many years ago from the mainline release. Are there fewer active everything developers around? Do those eager for change have the time to commit to learning and developing this? To the first question I suspect yes, I can only think of a hand full of sites still using this engine, which isn't to say they don't do it well (regardless what you think of the content, Slashdot still exists and I believe operates well under a reasonable load of traffic). Would there be more interest from the wider perl community of someone wanted to start an effort to recreate the site functionality in Mojolicious or Dancer2? Perhaps. I think there are many factors to this, and I'm not sure there is no one specific answer anyone can give you which will be accurate, I think more likely a combination of various factors.