For those that believe that adding "use 7" is too much boilerplate, think what would happen when the slightly incompatible 7.01 comes out?
What I took away from the presentation was that “breaking” changes would never be in minor releases like that; and that use feature "unicode_strings" and friends was a pretty big blockage to new features even being known, let alone used; and I agree there. Speaking of which, the only two things I found awful about the presentation were 1) social cop lectures/analysis even though I ended up moving slightly in the direction of their arguments because they were well thought out and 2) opting for “no way!” with regards to default UTF-8 behavior. Given I only had two call-outs on so many huge issues, I should say I’m impressed and hopeful and trying overlook some of the strong similarities to the whole Perl6 transition “plan” that is a part of what you are calling out.