At some point, the syntactic sugar just gets to be too much and it's just simpler to go to another language like Ruby, Python, Javascript, or Smalltalk

And give up CPAN? Silly hacker, no cookies for you! :P

We would all love to live in a perfect polyglot world (especially a programming language fetishist like myself), but it just simply does not exist in reality. The level of sophistication of Perl libraries and the amount of battle testing the best ones have endured is the whole reason that I wrote Moose (surely you remember, you were there :P).

Even stvn would agree that some of the really esoteric bits of Moose aren't ever going to be usable.

Nope, I would most definitely NOT agree with you on that, not in the least :)

The deep esoteric bits are not there for the casual user, they are their for the deep meta-hacker, or the MooseX:: author. Moose is layered as such that you only need to use as much as you want too, there are many rest-stops on the way down the rabbit hole.

Sometimes, a blessed hashref with cut'n'paste mutators is the right way to go.

Sure if you get paid by the LOC or better yet get paid by the hour so you can make the big bucks tracking down typo-bugs. Implementing (and re-implementing and re-implementing and re-implementing) the mechanisms of OOP for every single class is just plain wasteful, as wasteful as it would have been for me to have re-typed "and re-implementing" 3 times above instead of using copy/paste.