May you be at ease and worries dissipate ...

I'm just a code grunt without enough time to keep up with the latest in language theory or industry trend.

No need to be so self-dismissive. You know what "Longhorn" is, you've heard of joelonsoftware, Class::DBI, and you're on perlmonks. This proves you at least know how to look stuff up. Unless you are in academia, most 'industry trends' consist of simply interpreting this season's new fashionable 'buzzwords' and translating that into what you already know.

(I am) lazy enough not to want to switch to something new ... at least until I find something even better.

Unless you are willing to at least compromise on this, this single attitude will be the biggest source of innumerable woes, worries and frustrations for you. It will give you grey hair. It will rob you of sleep. Many have been there before. Why? Because being the "best" technology is neither necessary nor sufficient to being a "widely adopted" technology. In fact it frequently happens that popularity is inversely correlated with "elegance". How much you wanna bet (for example) more people know what is XSLT than know what is Haskell?

There's no need to succumb to the popular fall-back of assuming "those other people" ignorant, uninformed, or idiots. Lots of intelligent people recognize the grass-roots greatness of perl, but who also recognize the circumstances of mass-marketroid top-down corporate-driven "innovation" and adapt to it as necessary without compromising their ideals.

Some people really dig the metric system, base 12 arithmetic and Dvorak keyboards. It would be a shame, however, for them to lose sleep and worry just because not everyone else 'gets it' ... you might as well worry about bio-engineered quantuum nano-bots that render *all* programming languages obsolete. Unless and until that happens, you are definitely safe to know and contribute to perl, which is *not* going away any time soon, and don't be unwilling to play the 'buzzwords game' if that is what it takes to put food on the table.