You make it sound as if the author owes you something.

CPAN is a volunteer operation, people donate code in the hope that it will be useful. Yes, it's rude not to acknowledge a bug report or patch, but there are any number of reasons: people may be too busy, the e-mail forwarding address may be obsolete, the author may have lost interest. It takes discipline to manage CPAN modules correctly and so it's only natural that there's a certain amount of attrition over the years.

If you have made a concerted effort to get in touch with the author (and ranting on Perlmonks doesn't count), can show that you are able to close out most, if not all, bugs on the RT queue of the distribution, then send a message to module-authors@perl.org documenting this, and you will be granted co-maint status on the module. This happens all the time.