Does anyone have any idea when/if strawberry 5.14 will appear?

Someone might - but that(those) person(s) are keeping very quiet.
I'm sceptical that ActivePerl is as out-of-the-question as you believe, but then that scepticism is obviously not based on any facts (since you haven't elaborated).

I see that kmx has, in the last few days, updated his 32-bit and 64-bit toolchains ... let's hope that's a good omen.

Cheers,
Rob