Being a Perl novice and not at all a web programmer of any kind, my perspective is more broad-based (some may think it useless) but I have a general impression of maybe why Perl is not a favored language for development. It seems to me that newer scripting languages focus on delivering solutions that can be marketed as clean, easy, and quick-to-learn, while the powerful folks who use and develop Perl develop these same things for those already inside the community. With these other languages, the focus is narrow, there's one common platform that everyone uses. Perl has a problem rooted in its philosophy of TMTOWDI where you're free to do and use practically whatever you want (and usually there are a multitude of solutions thanks to CPAN).

Mind you this is a rough perception, and if it's untrue it's an unfortunate result of the general discussion going around, but a manager at a big company won't necessarily know all the various wonderful details and abilities of Perl, but rather what the competition is doing.