No but seriously, nice comment and summary :)

That is, key in on simplicity first and flexibility second. My take on a lot of programmers nowadays is that they want to be spoon fed the right way to do things. They will take a simple example over a lengthy discussion of multiple ways to accomplish something.

I totally agree, particularly novice-to-intermediate programmers learning Perl. If they get in any way frustrated and there is an easier language to learn that does the same things they will of course take, as you said, the path of least resistance. One of the reasons in my community for moving to Python was exactly what you stated, Perl from their perspective didn't spoon feed them the best or most recommended way to solve whatever problem they were working on and people just want to get their jobs done without any additional hassle, again very much like what you have said. Python for all of its problems has spoon fed for better or for worse and that attracts programmers who are frustrated and just want to solve their problem.

Now this shift started occurring a few years ago when Perl as a community was more or less at a lower point, but since then as we all know there has been a incredible new energy, so many amazing distros on CPAN, and so much has changed in the language that most of those people in my community who changed wouldn't even recognize the Perl of today. From my perspective there has been big shift since a couple years in the community's attitude towards the comments you have stated and many major things within Perl have and are being done this way.

With Perl and CPAN so many of us love that it's so powerful and flexible there isn't any programming problem that cannot be solved with it, but I am glad that leaders in the community are seeing that humans don't like too much choice, that to keep new programmers we have to make the learning curve as easy as we can (yes more spoon feeding). There has been a lot of research done showing too much choice is confusing and frustrating and with programming humans are no different, as one example have a look at the book Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.