Second, I think that what Larry and the cabal eventually discovered (I wasn't there at the time) was that you couldn't incorporate most of the new suggestions into Perl without first going through a total rewrite.

This was exactly the conclusion of the RFC process. Larry et al decided that there were enough contradictory proposals to patch problems on the surface that any real redesign of the language required deeper thinking to achieve cohesive consistency.

Any alternative history which glosses over the Perl 6 RFC period (or, as is the case in this thread, ignores it outright) has divorced itself from reality and entered instead the weird realm of Perl 6 Fanfic. I half expect to see a hard requirement for a race of militant space pandas enslave Europe in some of these alternate proposed project plans.