My perspective is that I'm glad that they are entertaining themselves, but they aren't going to succeed.

It is easy to run a subset of Perl 5 faster than Perl 5. But when you add in all of the features, beating Perl 5 on speed becomes hard.

It always was the dream to integrate Perl 5 and Perl 6. But cleaning up the internals of Perl 5 until general people could work on it would be a several month project that only a handful of people in the world have the expertise to do.

And even if you did that, how do you reconcile Perl 5 reference counting with Perl 6 true garbage collection? The two do not cooperate very well, and a lot more Perl 5 code than you would think relies on things like reliable timing of destruction. On this issue the community has generally been divided into people who think that this won't be doable, and people who think that some day a smart solution will be produced. To date, no smart solution has emerged.

Also Perl 6 was a wonderful dream to entertain people, but its real world adoption is..limited. Like it or not, Perl 6 is effectively here and is named Python 3. No, it doesn't look like the Perl 6 people thought it would, but sometimes that is life.