I actually get this in private conversations a fair bit lately. The primary reason I hear for its use when other options are being tossed around is that its due to being a corporate setting, where C-level-type folks want something that they have to pay for, because that seems more legitimate. These are organizations that often don't employ any Open Source software (that they're aware of), and a purchase constitutes quality and support.

That said, the majority of the issues crop up because those same people forgo any updates, because that actually hits their budgets, so lower-level staff have to do things like OP is trying to do, and work around these types of legacy issues, which, in (pulling random statistic out of my ass) many cases causes even worse problems in the future until eventually, something needs to be done at a very large scale to rectify all of the custom nonsense, offsetting any perceived 'value' that may have been had when signing an agreement/purchase order.

Fun stuff.

ps. I've never actually used Active State, so I can't say whether it's good or bad. That said, proprietary package manager for Perl? Yeah, no. Seems like a direct vendor lock-in for no tangible benefit at all.