Well, keep in mind that Moose is different from MooseX::Declare. The later has a much longer dependency chain because honestly it is doing a lot more (parsing signatures, fiddling with op-trees, wrapping methods, etc). This is quite different from the core Moose dependency chain, which is fairly short for what it provides.

Now, I have personally run into occasions where a Moose install was pretty hefty, but in those cases it was usually because some of the core modules I had were old. If I recall correctly it was the Test:: modules that were out of date and that did result in a seemingly long dependency chain.

Is it time to start treating Perl like linux and have *distributions* that package what we need? A Sysad distro? A Web App distro? A Modern Perl distro? I don't have an answer ... just curious.

One of the eventual goals of the Enlightened Perl Organization is to eventually have an "enlightened perl" distro that will include all these things already. I am not sure where this project is currently at, but if you are interested in helping you should shoot them an email.