I feel your pain! And have felt it for the last four years or so as I'm in a Websphere shop. I refuse to defend WebSphere as I think its a mockery of J2EE. However, when you have to scale applications that will run upwards of 5000 transactions/minute and share code and applications accross a hundred departments you quickly see where Perl just isn't the best tool for the job.

I've always stuck my nose into every enterprise Perl discussion hoping to either think or discover an angle that would make it more palatable to large corporations beyond that of a batch/scripting language. At this point I'm realizing Perl does what it does. Inspires inovation, solves crises, and gives me an edge over other developers when the heat is on. I find I'm not looking to make Perl into what it isn't, but constantly looking for where I can take advantage of it as it is.