I think my reply below addresses your comments regarding the suitability of those 600 packages. I will agree that it is hard to know what to look at in such a long list, so your frustration is understandable.

It seems that despite three plus years and all the hype, it's mostly Moose (and one or two in-house projects) that is using Moose.

Well, this is very much not true. Of course you have no real way of knowing these things as your obviously not working at one of the companies that makes use of Moose :)

I addressed a similar statement in this reply a while back, but Moose has grown even more since then and the list has expanded. We have built apps using Moose that are used by Walmart, Marriott Hotels, Grey Advertising and Aetna Insurance to name a few. I know for sure that Moose is being used (in some non-trivial capacity) at Yahoo!, Symatec, IMDB, Pobox, Best Practical, ValueClick, Magazines.com, Reuters, Takkle.com, BBC, Hearst Publishing and SocialText. I know of at least two Bioinformatics projects that are using it (and there is a BioMoose project going on to port BioPerl to Moose). I heard rumors that it is being used at Amazon and possibly within Google (it was part of the "Perl on Google App Engine" push at first but the steam seems to have run out on that project now). There has been a steady couple of jobs on jobs.perl.org which ask for Moose experience over the last couple of months. And last but not least, while it is most certainly Not Safe For Work, YouPorn is one of the most visited sites on the internet and run completely on Perl and making use of Moose.

And that can possibly be attributed to the complete dearth of examples of applications that use Moose to do real work, rather than cutesy examples to demonstrate it feature set.

I think again my reply below addresses this, many of these modules do very real work. Unfortunately it is rather hard to see "real work" examples because they are usually proprietary and all that you get to see is what portions of that work were re-usable enough to send to CPAN.

Anyway, hope this clears up any misconceptions that you might have accumulated.