[expeditious]

> There's a lot of CPAN activity, but my impression is that a lot of it seems confined to only a handful of problem domains.

You can see a list of recent uploads here: http://www.cpan.org/RECENT.html

> There's tons of choice with date libraries,

Most everyone uses DateTime.

> or OO frameworks,

Nowadays choosing this one is simple: Moose

> or unit test frameworks

Test::More is pretty standard.

> For all the talk of CPAN being so killer, there actually isn't much there that other languages don't also have.

That is approximately the opposite of my experiences with the CPAN.