Greetings. I think chromatic has put it succintly: you seem to assume that if it weren't for Pugs, everyone working on Pugs would put the same amount of effort to the same effects into Perl 6. That not the case; Pugs has inspired dozens of people actively hacking unit tests and patches, mostly from people who will otherwise not be able to contribute to the Perl6 effort.

Actually, the reverse of what you assumed is happening; Pugs is increasingly seen as a much more viable way to bootstrap the Perl6 process, and has been of much help for the language design.

Also note that for many platforms, GHC is much easier to install than Parrot. :-) So I encourage you to install a GHC binary, download Pugs, and start hacking Perl6 now and send patches to perl6-compiler, as other people are doing now.

Thanks,
/Autrijus/