In any case, the fact that the project wasn't abandoned after all that speaks for itself. It's here and the future was never brigher for it than it is now.
It might not prosper, but it will prevail.
Why should anybody have hopes for anything, they don't like.
>>It took 16(!) years to implement features other languages already have.
Like what? Have you even looked at the Perl 6 feature list?
>>And CPAN is the dark, sad pit of forgotten and abandoned packages.
Clearly you have no active involvement with the Perl community.
That said, it is still good practice to try to avoid dependencies on packages that are not maintained, or you might find yourself the de-facto maintainer of the package. This is true across all languages.
Perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of Perl is that no language that comes after it can be considered complete until it has its own CPAN like package management system. That and the regular expression engine of course.
Perl is still by and large the only language with that many amount of library options, the only other language I can think which rivals that is Java.