I presume the major thing holding this approach back is that there are not that many people with knowledge of C and Perl internals who are willing and available to work on Perl.
Thats not how it was 5 years ago or even 10 years ago. The community of Perl has dropped and I have seen no major steps of recovery. Since Python and PHP have taken over the programing market, Perl jobs have turned into Ruby, Python or PHP.
I guess company's like their programs made by languages that dont have internal community issues.