Do you mean the language or the libraries? Granted, one of the things that most distinguishes Perl from a lot of other languages is its huge tracts of libraries, but there's a big difference between saying that Perl is chaos and that its libraries are. I think you can make a case for either, but I believe you're referring mostly to the libraries.

Also, if Perl 5 is sick and bloated, why do we have to leave it to die? Imagine that the people who are off creating Perl 6 now were instead putting all their effort into organizing and cleaning up the standard Perl 5 modules, deprecating old language features, etc. Imagine that Perl's leadership were dull and plodding, like a FORTRAN or C standards committee. One year from now they could decide on a new, leaner set of core libraries. Perl 5.10 could deprecate the old libraries and interfaces, and 5.12 could remove them. Change on an evolutionary timescale may seem boring and slow, but it can be remarkably effective. We humans are a software engineer's nightmare, loaded with evolutionary baggage, but software engineers haven't been able to create better.

/s