Thank you, dragonchild, first and foremost, for the reference to Strawberry Perl.

I didn't mean to belittle the opinion that CPAN shouldn't be touched, nor that I should just sit around and complain, nor that those who contribute don't provide an invaluable service to everyone, not least of which myself. Rather I was trying to constructively point out my own mini wishlist, thinking that making CPAN and the better parts of Perl more accessible to the uninitiated may be relevant to a discussion of drawing new users to Perl. The fact that you dismissed it out-of-hand shows that it's a tired argument, and I apologize for that.