A supersearch here on perlmonks shows that people do use POE, maybe the mailing list you're referring to is unpopular for other reason (not everyone are maillist junkies :) ? )

Frankly, though I think POE looks very good, I feel it's an overkill for a lot of tasks. There's something unique about Perl programmers - we want to get the job done. Perl makes it possible for most cases without using heavy and complex frameworks.

That said, I do appreciate POE's architecture, and I'll probably give it a shot for the next multi-tasking Perl app I write. For now, I managed to write a non-trivial application using the threads module, and that worked very well.