Great, a ruby fan boy... Where did I claim porting adds new features? I'm saying porting is one of the reasons Perl became so wide spread. Additionally Perl 5.x still receives updates so I wouldn't call it old either. And Perl is a mature language that won't see much changes anymore at this point, get used to it. If you want new and shiny Perl really isn't the language for you.
If you want powerful syntax, the ability to quickly write code that will still perform well then Perl really is the primary choice. Perl can in fact beat Java in performance on certain areas to give you an idea about just how damn fast it is. Ruby isn't even close to either in terms of performance.
And sure many things in the CPAN archive are filled with duplicates. But again lets look at the quality of the code. Writing something in Perl takes a lot more skill than writing something similar in Ruby as such the code produced by the average Perl "programmer" is statistically going to be better. Again something you will have to accept. And Perl code will never look nice, again get used to it. Perl is a contest about how much you can put in a single line. Ruby is something people use to mess around in. Whenever a project becomes serious they have to start stepping away from Ruby cause it becomes a hassle to maintain the code. Performance drops like a brick and scaling becomes rather complicated compared to languages like Perl, PHP, Python and others.
For all its flaws I'd still rather write things in Perl than in Ruby; Cause in the end of the day I know if I need to quickly do something Perl is up to the job every single time. I have yet to run into a case where Perl failed to deliver the results. Ruby and Python on the other hand...