I think you are missing the point here. I'm not saying Perl is hard or impossible to program, or that it is 'bad' or anything, just that Perl code very often comes out obfuscated and hard to interpret, even for someone who knows many other programming languages.
Example: instead of '$^P |= 0x10', something along the lines of 'sys.debug = True' is a lot easier to read, right? Perl code is full of such examples, I could make up at least 20 examples from the module linked to before in this thread, all using alternatives resembling different other languages, and all much easier to interpret.
The problem with Perl (as far as I can judge) is that it tries to cram too many different things into operators and magic variables, and that it allows too much wonky stuff that might come in handy to shave off a few characters if you are a guru, but could just as well have been left out, sacrificing compactness for readability. Another thing that Perl seems to lack is orthogonality, I always get the impression that the language allows you to solve the same problem in 10 different ways.
Just to give a counter-example, take a look at Objective-C code, which is almost the antithesis of Perl. It's almost self-documenting because of the naming conventions, named parameters, the way the frameworks are designed, etc. Sure, it's about 10 times more verbose than Perl, and the core language probably has 10 times less features, but if you have a good editor and don't try to obsessively do things 'your way' instead of 'the Objective-C way', it's a joy to work with.
If you spend enough time in the Perl world, of course you'll get used to the language features and syntax of the language, and forget about how long it took to get to that point. At that point it's probably a perfectly fine and powerful language that allows very fast development.
> The libraries available are the most important asset of a language, more important than the language itself
100% agreed, but most other popular languages also have huge libraries (core SDK libraries or third-party). At some point you reach some kind of critical mass where you can solve 99% of the problems using native libraries, leaving only 1% that requires bindings to e.g. C/C++, shell exec, RPC, etc. Most other languages already reached that point or make it easy enough to interface with other languages that have more libraries, to the extent lack of libraries is not an issue anymore (such as Objective-C, for example).