Perl6 was really a different fiasco.
Perl had the could be bytes, could be characters fiasco in 5.8, but they didn't include a bunch of other difficult changes at the same time. 5.8 could be a bit rough around unicode, but 5.10 was pretty solid as I recall, and you can always use bytes; in a scope where you need bytes.
Perl already had python2->python 3000 fiasco before python: PERL6