Let's go over your arguments one by one. Please note that I don't find TPC worth the costs, so I'm partially the devils advocate.

• Perl 6 is coming out and we need to stay with the changes in order to avoid getting blindsided

  Perl 6 won't be out by at least another year, and TPC is by far the only place where you can get that information. If your boss knows what's going on in the Perl world, this will backfire on you, because the boss will point out to you that you apparently haven't kept up with Perl 6.

• You can meet more important people in 3 days at something like this than you can in 3 years of just doing your job

  Meeting people is, IMO, the most important reason to attend a conference. Perhaps the only reason.

• Two words: Damian Conway

  Damian is fun and he tickles your mind to think differently, but I cannot find a business reason to meet him.

• The Open Source conference is right next door, so we can find out about developments in all things OS, PHP, Apache, etc.

  Perhaps. Whether this is relevant depends a lot on the nature of your company.

• The various workshops and lightning talks are all but guaranteed to show us optimizations that will save us a clock cycle or two, or at lease keep us from writing the same thing that someone else has already written on CPAN

  Well, you don't have to go to a conference to find out what's available on CPAN. You can find out what's available on CPAN in less time it takes to drive to the airport. And I think you are overestimating the optimizations you will be shown at the conference.

• The very people who wrote so much of the code we're relying on right now will be there in person. They have an incredible amount of knowledge to share, and it would be great to be among so many talented resources in the same place

  This is more or less the same as your second point.

• The next State of the Onion

  Likely to be on the web before you are back from the conference.

If I were your boss, I would ask you, "what does TPC give you that YAPC didn't give you?". If you did go to YAPC, you would have a hard time to convince me I should spend the money to send you to TPC too. If you didn't ask to be send to YAPC, I'd asked you why you didn't and waited for TPC.

Personally, I think that a conference that costs $1000 in fees, and then you still have to pay for the tutorials doesn't belong in the spirit of Perl and its community.(*) The most important feature of a conference is to meet people, and that's specially important for people new in the field. Which are often the people who don't have bosses that will pay.

I doubt you will ever see me on TPC. Not even when O'Reilly or my boss is willing to pay all expenses. OTOH, I will try to attend any YAPC, be it in Europe, North-America or elsewhere - regardless whether my boss will pay or not.

(*) Note that I am not suggesting that O'Reilly is making large amounts of money of TPC. They are not. Organizing TPC as it is costs a lot of money. But, as YAPC proves, there are other ways to organize a conference.

-- Abigail