You didn't address any of my points. Perl may have been horrible, line noise or a read only language, but 20 years ago was the quickest way to write a visitor book or a mailform. You could do it in C but didn't, just because you didn't need to. If the perl prototype was good enough, you could use it in production, and thousands of sites started to build whole e-commerce systems and found they worked.

Thad was a tipping point for the web, and the world now is different just because of that.

If you have to choose between power and easiness of development, most people will choose the later, and if I can try a new hardware board that doesn't force me to learn anything new, I'd probably try it.