Having worked on real-world projects in Perl, Python and Ruby, I can tell you that CPAN is not a differentiator. It doesn't matter if there are gazillions of packages to choose from. What matters is if I can find the packages I need to do the job. I remember working on a Perl project and being mocked by a Python guy because I had to implement a library that was already available for Python. On the other hand, I could choose from many different Perl packages to help me write classes and do things that Python does out of the box.