I've been an active Perl 6 user since 2008; during that time, I've often had too high expectations on then-current Rakudo implementations: I've been dabbling in wiki software, etc. It was slow. Sometimes it was unstable.

Seen from ten thousand meters, Rakudo 2008-2010 was about features, and Rakudo 2011 has been about performance. As moritz' retrospective states, the fruits of that work are only coming online now. That will enable more people to move into performance-sensitive fields such as web development with Perl 6. That's already starting to happen; see tadzik's Bailador project, for example.

Meanwhile, my Perl 6 production code has been getting by with slightly lowered expectations on performance and memory frugality. Crashes/segfaults are no longer a problem (as they were in 2008/2009). Tradeoff example: My blog, which runs on Perl 6, is statically generated rather than dynamically. That's been working out pretty nicely.

When I need more speed and/or regex/grammar features, I go with Niecza. Otherwise, I mostly develop on Rakudo. But Niecza's main developer is developing at an almost intimidating pace, and I expect to be using Niecza even more in 2012.