From your description it sounds like you were frustrated by coding horrendous Perl and instead of learning it you moved to a language with training wheels. I'd rather just fall a few times while I'm learning so I can go much faster afterwards.
"Why would people choose Perl over Python or Ruby?"
It's fast in productivity and performance. There are great books. It's on every Unix machine. CPAN still reigns supreme as the ultimate library repository. These days there's some great frameworks for web development, my favorite being Catalyst with DBIx::Class and Template Toolkit.
Ruby is mostly just Perl without all the mental baggage of people seeing bad Perl code for years. The way a restaurant might avoid saying "squid" and instead say "calimari" -- it sells a lot better.
I am not saying that there can't be valid reasons for hating Java. I just think most of the times it is rather the specific frameworks than the language itself that pisses people off. For example I can't bring myself to write EJBs - having to create 5 files just to be able to call a method remotely exceeds my pain tolerance. Yet in many big cooperations someone up in the management chain has decided that every Java Application has to use EJBs. That I hate, too. It's misleading to judge Java based on that perversity, though - EJBs are just a framework written in Java, not the Java programming language.
Anyway, out of curiosity, is Perl still relevant today? Why would people choose Perl over Python or Ruby?