Can you link to where they've been saying that for years? I honestly had quite the opposite impression and recall it being basically heretical to suggest that Perl 6 was not Perl. I've sorta been waiting for Perl 6 to go off to wherever languages du jour like Haskell, Clojure, Scala, Erlang, etc. go. Sorry if that seems a bit hostile. Perl 6 certainly has nice ideas.

I can't remember which book it was, but in one of the books by Feynman he mentioned how in high school he'd understood mathematics using methods or notation that nobody else used. The problem is it doesn't matter how well you understand something if nobody else understands you; you have to be able to communicate your ideas. On the other hand, he invented Feynman diagrams, so go figure. I'm not sure I even have a point here, but if I do it is that Perl 6 doesn't seem like Feynman diagrams.