Without wishing to sound critical, I think that you are perhaps overly concerned with XP and with the words associated with a given level of XP. It seems to me that XP should be no more than a sort of fun incentive to grow, rather than something you struggle for and fight over. It's not a particularly good measure of much, except how popular your posts are with the other monks. As someone recently pointed out, there was one monk who never posted a single article, yet attained the level of "saint". For all I know, s/he might not even have tried to learn Perl.

Rather than remain upset over this, why not try to make it fun, just learn Perl, ask questions, post answers, and so on? You've offered some very good answers to questions - you must know your stuff. So sit back and enjoy... or not. I guess it's really just how you feel...