> I think this was because Perl's early success in the 90s was based on CGI.pm, not frameworks.
Exactly, the second wave of dotcom software was largely written using frameworks that built on the mistakes we'd been making in the first wave.
And because, so many programmers had memories of horrible experiences trying to beat Perl/CGI applications into submission, it was probably too late for Perl even then - although a large number of excellent Perl tools (Catalyst, DBIx::Class, Template Toolkit, Moose, PSGI to name just a few) were emerging at about the same time as Ruby on Rails or Django.
