However, you can use PPM to install MinGW and dmake for ActivePerl so that you can install directly from CPAN.

That's what I tried to say with "A working build environment was only recently added as an optional package."

it looks like ActiveState has decided to start moving away from using their own package managers for their distributions of programming languages and will rely more on the community package repository

That sounds like a good idea, and it is a logical consequence of providing a build environment package. ActiveState could not stop people from using CPAN anyway, and even less after providing the build environment.

To be fair, I haven't used or even followed the changes in ActivePerl. For me, it is obsoleted by Strawberry Perl, and so I feel no need to follow what happens in ActivePerl.

Alexander