That's... quite a claim. I'm hardly the only contributor to Perl 5 who thinks that the obsession over backwards compatibility with an unknowable and unmeasureable DarkPAN is unhealthy.
nperez (author of the darkpan-schmarkpan post) may not be a contributor to p5p (Perl core language developers' mailing list), but a quick glance at http://search.cpan.org/~nperez/ shows that he's contributed some interesting code to the POE and Moose codebases. I think Rafael was a bit harsh in his "Perl Developers Actively Care..." post when he seemingly dismissed the opinions of anyone who doesn't contribute sufficiently good patches to p5p.
I immediately withdraw my claim and beg for forgiveness from everybody who does contribute but have the opposite opinion!