It's changing.
You don't have to use it

Now where's the problem?

I'm not going to bother with trying to discuss the why because I don't think you ever intended this to be a discussion. Rather a rant on why you don't like it.

I talked about languages that didn't change and have fallen out of favor because of that. As far as things sticking around, that was with respect to how people program (OO). Those things tend to stick around. We haven't lost functions. We haven't lost closures.. or pointers.. or just about anything else except for line numbers (i.e. Basic). Perl has done a lot more than serve a niche for quite a while now. It's been a hell of a lot more than a text processing language for quite a while. I mainly use it for win32 OLE stuff and GUI apps. I've also used it for cgi scripts, text processing, remote server monitoring and many more things. I like that I can do all that with one language.

It really seems like you're digging at things just to argue and be defiant. Perl is still going to be Perl. To pin the future of Perl on loosing $foo->bar() is a little short sighted.

Remember:
It's changing
You don't have to use it
Move on