Perl attracts a lot of casual programmers. There are many who use Perl and have no real interest in programming per se. They've heard that OO is hard and that it requires lots of heavy books about design patterns and UML. They've probably had this view reinforced by expensive Java or C++ consultants.

Many casual programmers are also wary of anything new that they preceive as a barrier between them and coding. I think this is part of the source of attitudes like "I can't learn about CPAN right now; I've got to get this templating module written by tomorrow!"

I don't have any very useful advice about getting people past this, except maybe to provide some examples of when objects provide a cleaner, safer way to solve a programming problem.