Your disclaimer serves you well. I've known professional C programmers who were barely competent, and professional Perl programmers who are
good technologists.
Perl jobs are offered for lower wages, I suspect, because Perl itself is still pigeonholed into being a web or scripting only language. It's a preconceived bias, sure, but this is why it's important not to limit yourself as merely a "Programmer of language X."
It's been said before: programming languages are a tool. A skilled practitioner uses the right tool for the job - and the master knows that Perl may well be the right tool, more often than you think.
Peace,