I agree, but Perl can be saved, and honestly, it wouldn't take the stuff that you're talking about. All it takes is a few more killer apps like WebGUI and SpamAssassin to bring it back to life. It requires developers to take off their developer hats, and stop writing perl modules as stand alones and start writing "Products".
Perl is a giant mess of projects, but has only a couple real products. And that's it's problem.