I wholeheartedly support the "Rakudo/Parrot/Pugs/Ponie/whatever..." team but IMHO most of the problems and tensions are the result of a communication tragedy.

Honestly, Perl6 should be renamed into something like Perl++.

It's much more than the next evolutionary step of Perl5, it's incorporating revolutionary concepts which can't be achieved in normal release steps..

But at the same time we are living in a marketing world, where the crowd measures the quality of a product at the release numbers.

Releasing a Perl5 compatible successor, maybe just bundling Moose for OOP and Coro for multithreading and maybe some syntax cosmetics and restriction³ to contradict the "write only language" complaint would easily cannibalize the Ruby spectra like they are actually cannibalizing the Python spectra.¹

But sadly such a successor can't be named Perl6, because this name slot is already taken.

And at the same time the "Perl++ team" has to cope with the burden and pressure of the whole community impatiently waiting for a answer to the contemporary needs.

They are constantly forced to justify why they are making gold, where the market just needs iron to be turned into steel. ²

Thats a marketing desaster!

Perl5 is somehow in the situation of Neanderthals who are told by the gods that further evolution is useless because Sapiens Sapiens will arrive in Europe and wipe them out.

Actually it took thousands of years to replace them ...

UPDATE: added links and to title and improved language

Footnotes:

¹) It's so paradox to see how a beautified syntax on Perl semantics plus Smalltalk object model named Ruby easily takes steadily growing market shares ....

²) and let me be clear Perl++ IS gold, but meanwhile our customers live in the stone age and are going to other jewelers to buy gems made of iron...

³) perl critic but anal!