I literally do this for a living, literally every weekday. Give me a pragmatic, rugged, practical tool that actually does something dramatically useful.

Perl 5.

“And hurry up, willya?”

"Already are. And we'll be even faster if you come help!"

I am encouraged by the promise of Perl-6 and am sensitive to the diligent efforts of those who are working on it

Sounds great.

I have tremendous respect for people who are capable of working at that level ... but, a product has to ship, if only so that the real-world professional community can kick the tires and discover what (else) needs to be changed or fixed.

I'm amazed that you think that you are sensitive, say you have tremendous respect for the people working on Perl 6, and yet think it makes sense to make this braindead obvious point about shipping a product, as if they didn't understand it as well as you do.

there have been no opportunities given yet for any of those craftsmen to determine if it is truly useful for anything.

What?!? It's an open source project. Anyone can download and try any of several compilers at any time.

More to the point, one of the compiler projects, Rakudo, created a distribution called Rakudo Star, first released in 2010 (and updated many times since, and due another update soon) for no other reason than to do exactly what you ask. This was promoted, and arguably slowed down the overall project, so please understand how frustrating it is to hear you say it hasn't been done!

Right now, from a purely market-driven point of view, Perl-6 is just an armchair quarterback, known to be the offspring of a great and well-respected player, but himself never tested on the field of battle.

Right. And that will remain the case until it isn't. What else do you expect? If you want Christmas to come earlier, then CONTRIBUTE.