Your post brings up several unrelated points. I will try to respond to them as best I can.

I don't think we can help you very much in deciding to stay or go. There are a lot of variables involved in that kind of decision. Can you find another job? Can you afford the time it will take to find another job? Can you tolerate learning a new language? Can you tolerate the personal anguish of seeing a language you "love ... so much" be "degraded" by another? These are questions we can't really answer.

On a side note, your experience with Java will probably depend more on the team you're working with than the language itself. There are definitely bad parts, but overall it's a capable language that can be used in both good and terrible ways. If you decide to stay, you should approach it with an open mind and disregard a lot of the snide comments you've likely heard.

Your comments about Perl's future not "seem[ing] very bright" are misguided, I think. Negative comments do not mean something is going to die, even if they're true and there are a lot of them. Perl 5 certainly has deficiencies, but this is hardly a death sentence. The community is still very active. CPAN is continually evolving and gaining new modules, and there are plenty of people still using Perl to do things. This is about all you can ask of a language that's run almost entirely via volunteerism.

Lastly, your comment about Perl's syntax being a mess may be true, but I don't really see how it affects the situation one way or another. It's long been known that Perl is hard to parse, even for perl itself. The thread you're referring to brings up a fairly well known ambiguity in the language, and doesn't really signal the end of the world from any reasonable point of view.