I personally have used Perl for:
- A model of a PBX to test mobile phone software (used as a PBX at 9/11 to look for mobile phone signals)
- A website to serve various media
- A conversion tool between one database to another where the vendor's tools were inadequate
- Various sysadmin needs over the years (awk and sed are icky)
- Several web applications that do ad-hoc reporting on millions of rows of data.
I've been in the workforce for under 10 years and that's what I've run across. You're just not looking in the right places.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?