It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA are in LA. People outside of LA have a hard time seeing its charms given the lack of transportation structure other than giant freeway traffic jams and busses that come a few times a day and can take a half day to travel a few miles. The cost of living in a decent neighborhood is very high, yet most positions offer mid west style salary. Most developers will take a huge hit to their standard of living by accepting an LA job, so LA employers mostly try to recruit locally and even when they do recruit from out of town, few are willing to attend to basic hygiene issues such as paying for relocation costs.
On the Perl issue, I use Perl for a lot of things because it is very fast to code in and to execute. I find both C and assembler easier to understand than trying to read a complex regular expression in perl or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use. Regular expressions probably can't be simplified since they are their own very dense language, but the pointer syntax could be improved a lot. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard.
Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language.
I have just "dealt with it" all this time, but it's possible, given this post about LA, that fewer developers are willing to deal with the overhead of learning Perl given that for simple sites PHP can be more efficient for them, and for system scripts things like python have gotten more traction.