The problem with perls (5, 6, N) is that most of the competent, intelligent committers were either (a) subverted by O'Reilly contracts into being ardent defenders of the status quo, (b) fed up with waiting for years in order to get unintelligible exegeses from a chief committer who apparently lost all interest and was unable or unwilling to delegate, (c) driven into bafflement by the rivening of p5p into scads of unmanaged sublists and lost interest, (d) discovered thriving and engaged communities in languages not riddled top to bottom by political, organizational and leadership problems, or (e) fell into the black leather-winged embrace of crufty corporate nonsense that is python.

The numbering system merely hastened the demise by further making sure that any sensible interested committer would first check to see what was going on with the latest branch, discover it was the same godawful non-navigable incompetent mess of splintered crazy version wreckage floating abandoned on a lake of ennui that you can trivially see before you today, and run like fuck in the opposite direction.

The principal problem with perl today is that it still exists, and that last tenuous skeleton crew of 2-3 smart people who still struggle in vain to breathe life into its long dessicated corpse is still capering about claiming that there's still! some! path! to! relevance!, rather than doing the noble thing and finding employ as dishwashers or carpet cleaning fluid salesmen.