You need IDEs for bureaucratic languages like Java.
In Perl the language itself has a lot of power built-in and allows for concise programming. Thus it reduces the need for an IDE to do the work. Did you ever need to generate getter/setter methods in Perl? Perl is highly dynamic.
Autoloading, eval on Strings and difficulties with introspection should give an IDE a hard nut to crack.
I never considered using Perl-IDEs for that reason.
Now a newcomer asks for a lot of money for a tool that I am not convinced is useful. I couldn't help, that the negative attitude came into my mind when I read the e-mail and wrote the node.
I hope that you are right, he is a smart guy and I discover that Perl-IDEs are not be such a bad thing as I initially thought.
And that is my new attitude now. :-)