If you somehow relate XP to Perl expertise, you're way off. :) In fact, I have no understanding of how anyone with more than 3 hours of programming experience would see a relationship there. There are some people on this site (whom I know personally), that do excellent work, and yet have low XP. skeight is a good friend of mine and an amazing hacker. He was the type that would finish his programming exams in 15-20 minutes when everyone else would take 1.5-2 hours (I wish that was just an exaggeration).

I happen to have reasonably high XP even though at this time I do almost no Perl coding: my day job pays me to do something else and so I focus on that "something else" much more than I do Perl. As it turns out, I am currently doing a website in Perl for a client (it's still in it's very very very early stages, and the admin hasn't configured Apache properly yet, which is making matters worse, but it'll get there). As well, I just love using Perl, I find this site to have some really interesting stuff and think that I can offer useful advice also.

I wouldn't say you're being anal so much as naive.