What haters? There were a few trolls back then, some unix lovers showed a bit of hostility to Windozers, but generally the community was way bigger and way livelier back then. I do not see Perl being set to evolve nicely over the next decade. I see Perl6 continuing to attract tens and Perl losing ground steadily.

"coherent design". Mkay. Sure.

The radical break may have succeeded in making the not-at-all-Perl remaining attractive to creative thinkers like Damian Conway and (more like) tens like him at the expense of tens of thousands of others. Good job!

Also you are mixing up things that were written with things you made up. Yes the discussion is old hat, but it is interesting to quite a few and no one but you claimed it's doomed to failure. Debating whether it could or should have been done any other way is of course pointless. We don't have a time machine to go and convince Larry to, at the very least, NOT assign the next version number to the project.