Text manipulation is one of the tasks that Perl was developed for in the first place. If you already know Perl, then XSLT is going to seem like a poor substitute. I guess the easiest way to put it is along these lines: XSLT wasn't written for you.

That's an overstatement, of course. It's just that XSLT was written as a XML vocabulary for transforming other XML documents. For an XML author, it has the advantage of familiar syntax. It's also easy to write tools around XSLT (using Perl, for example) to produce a shiny GUI. But if you're only creating them for yourself, you might be happier with Perl.

The bits of XSLT that I really like involve other tidbits, like XPath. Still learning it, but it's a tremendously convenient notation for building links.

Besides, there's nothing to stop a clever Perlmonk from embedding Perl code as preprocessor instructions somehow. Then you would get the best of both worlds. Or the worst, depending on your mood that day.