I don't think you or BUU are missing anything except the perspective of the newly arrived immigrant. Perl has a great doc base but I didn't know about any of it till I'd been coding perl for almost a year. It's nobody's fault, it's that Perl attracts those who don't have a programming background. Many of the hackers here are computer scientists and engineers but a lot of the hackers in perl at large are English majors, designers, linguists, biologists, etc who, being self-taught, may well have never heard of "man" or "perldoc" and don't know where to turn for help besides the top matches on Google for perl like, unfortunately, Matt's Script Archive.