I cannot agree more with what you wrote, I think this is entirely true. More than a decade has passed since they started writing Perl6.
The problem is they also had a lot of implementation, instead of doing some centralized common effort, they spread like fishes when approaching obstacles in a stream.
Here's some quick statistics on the number of commits
8|Allison Randal
8|Julian Albo
10|Audrey Tang
13|mberends
15|Leopold Toetsch
16|James E Keenan (Jim)
17|Paul Cochrane
22|Andy Lester
35|Jonathan Scott Duff
35|Kyle Hasselbacher
38|Martin Berends
38|Mark Glines a.k.a. Infinoid
40|Cory Spencer
44|David Romano
45|Will "Coke" Coleda
52|Bernhard Schmalhofer
65|chromatic
97|Stephen Weeks
118|Carl Masak
229|Moritz A Lenz
232|Jerry Gay a.k.a. particle
429|Solomon Foster
477|jnthn
536|Moritz Lenz
796|Patrick R. Michaud
818|pmichaud
1040|Jonathan Worthington
It's pretty clear who the main people are here.
Maybe it's also a problem of competency. Maybe they don't master all the elements needed to write a language. I don't know. But I'm 100% there are reasons for Perl6 not being production-ready yet.
What is interesting to note is that these people are carrying out unpaid work. That means they have fragmented time slices which are used to implement Perl6. Again that's something very important. Also, because it's unpaid work, maybe it's not taken very seriously and the mentality of the whole project is something like yeah, we got this experiment going, and it's going to continue to be an experiment for a looong long time
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