A much larger part of the problem has always been that CPANRUN ( our build system for CPAN ) was designed fairly naively and has had only cursory attention paid to it since then. I know Gozer would love to have the time to re-implement from scratch but ActiveState is much smaller and more tightly focused than it has been in the past, and we just haven't found the time.

In my time supporting ActivePerl and PPM I've always felt really lucky that some people (like Randy) are also maintaining PPM repositories and filling in the blanks where CPANRUN falls down. It's pretty easy to install additional repositories using the PPM::Repositories package.