Yes, syntax will change. Yes, we as programmers will have to get used to potentially conflicting syntax between Perl 5.x and Perl 6.x. Boo-hoo for us.

I personally feel that, having programmed in Perl 4 and Perl 5, change as led by the Perl community is good! Who here will complain about references? Yet, I remember a ton of complaints re: references when they were introduced. Yet, that was the one thing that catapulted Perl from an obscure scripting language into an enterprise-level programming language.

These things are why I, regardless of syntactic sugar, will gladly use Perl 6:

1. Clean throw-catch syntax. eval-die just doesn't do it for me.
2. One operator, one operation. We want that out of our functions, why not out of our language?
3. The hyper-operators. They will make statements clean!
4. Attributes and prototypes. Used correctly and consistently, they will make code more maintainable and proveably correct. This can only be a good thing.
5. Parrot. Just the name is cool! The fact that I'll be able to embed opcodes wherever I want to is extremely powerful. Now, we get away from needing to go to C just to get our hands on the guts.

And, this is just off the top of my head, given four Apocalypses, knowing the language is over a year away. I haven't read a single Apocalypse where I felt an error was being made. I don't expect to, either.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.