What's amazing is that the Perl community not only accepts and encourages bad code, it's outright hostile to those who don't.

Odd. I tend to see the opposite.

A couple of crappy modules showed up on CPAN a few weeks ago, and both attracted a series of scathing reviews. Check out cwd and Template. Someone wandering into Perl for the first time would receive sufficient warning about these modules to avoid them.

This leaves the problem of older modules that don't come up on the radar of the small core of dedicated CPAN reviewers. I know for my own part that when I bring down a new module from CPAN that solves the problem at hand (or not), I take care to find the time to write up a review.

Peer review is about as good as it gets, and further increases the value of CPAN. While there is a lot of crap on CPAN, all the good stuff has by now begun to acquire good reviews. In some point in the future, if a CPAN module doesn't have a review, it may well mean that it isn't very good. And note that it's taken five years or so to get CPAN to this point. All the other dynamic languages are that much futher behind on the curve. I'll switch to Ruby or Lua when they have as useful a library, and as well peer reviewed, as Perl does.