Great insights. Thanks for the head slap that I knew some Monk would provide given the nature of a post like this.

I have a feeling your customers' concern has less to do with Perl per se, but perhaps more with the fact that you use your own homegrown custom CMS.

I think that about sums it up. And your challenge of comparing a CMS off-the-shelf vs a custom one is a good one. I have showed them live demos of both Joomla and mine and I think they see the profound differences (the publishing model of all the aforementioned PHP CMS's, and mine where if you want a new page you create a new page and not an "article"). I explain that ours came out of a request from client using Joomla and it was just too complicated for the folks in their office trying to keep up the site.

So, I have a viable product, I just need to put it all in the most favorable light and position it as something simple and intuitive...and easy to maintain.