IMHO not quite, perl's Mason was actually very easy to use. Thing was that mod_perl was a major PITA, you had to restart the server after each change to the code, it was integrated deeply into the apache request flow giving you millions of ways to shoot yourself in the foot, shared state meant that it was super easy to kill memory, etc. It was just too complicated and messy, also often unstable. And on the other hand you had PHP that was simple, had clean state flow and fast execution, and was much more html/web oriented: tons of ready to use functions, easy access to GET and POST variables, cookies, etc. In that moment it was a blessing.