but where does Perl really shine these days? That goes equally for the more conventional Perl 5 as well as the newer Perl 6.

It seems that nobody has really answered this question with respect to Perl 6. Let me try to give a few very brief answers on that part of the question.

Perl 6 has these to offer:

• It is a clean, modern, multi-paradigm language; it offers procedural, object-oriented and functional methodologies;
• Runtime optimization of hot code path;
• Malleable language, with the possibility to define functions, operators, traits and data types (adding a new operator is as simple as writing a subroutine);
• Improved, cleaner (and composable) regexes and built-in grammars (Perl 6 programs are compiled using a Perl 6 grammar);
• Lazy evaluation and infinite lists;
• Very powerful and high-level concepts for concurrency, parallelism and asynchronism for optimal use of multicore or multi-CPU architectures;
• Gradual typing, function signatures (including positional and named parameters), optional argument type-checking and subroutine multiple dispatch (based on signatures);
• a very powerful object model, with classes, roles, inheritance, subtyping, code reuse, introspection capabilities and meta-object programming;
• Powerful metaoperators and hyperoperators for applying code to lists of items;
• Unmatched unicode support;
• excellent interoperatibility with other languages such as Perl 5 (making it possible to use Perl 5 CPAN modules), Python and C (and others);