Randal, I strongly disagree that to be an effective Perl programmer you have to dive deep int othe community. Nor does one have to subscribe to all of their beliefs. If "Practical Extraction and Report Language" appears on the first page of perldoc, what is wrong with compressing that into PERL ?
Comment on Re^4: People who write perl, Perl and PERL
To be effective means to know when, where and how to ask. Sure you can solve all problems yourself, but it takes more time. Plus without being part of the community you probably do not even know about lots of potential problems. So you can't even begin solving them.