Well, to be fair to xdg, I dont think his characterization is wrong. Its a touch on the simplisitic side, and glosses over some of the finer points, but hes not really wrong.

I think you have a point when you say

It is being driven by the needs of people who do not know the platform and it's APIs, and are proposing solutions without a full understanding of the real problems, or the possibilities available for solving them.

However I see this as an issue of education. Since the VP and SP projects are intended to broaden access to Win32/Perl development enviornments hopefully we can expect to see people start to ramp up their Win32 knowledge and long term we can put aside of sillier UNIX-centric workarounds that have popped up.

Anyway, it would be really nice to have someone like yourself contributing to this effort, so I really hope you decide to help out.