existing applications and all of CPAN without modification. "The Perl language" is actually very small -- what matters is CPAN. It does not matter how "good" your changes are if they are
changes. Plenty of PHP sites chose not to "upgrade" to PHP-7 because of the many arbitrary breaking changes which caused production software to immediately stop working until sometimes very-extensive changes were made. If Perl-7 breaks existing systems in any way at all, it too will not be adopted: people will simply remain right where they are, and this will be the right decision. Perl's success leaves language designers with very few options.