Catalyst is so great. With Catalyst 5.8 I get Moosey controllers, which means my Perl 5 doesn't have to suck anymore because I can use Moose objects. Someone finally took a look at the framework developments in Ruby and Python and brought sanity to web development in Perl.

If it weren't for Catalyst, I'd have bailed from Perl a long time ago. It lets you build web apps that don't suck. Catalyst is 'unopinionated', it just gives you a minimal framework for building MVC web apps, with plugins to accomplish common tasks. Catalyst doesn't care what view or model you use. It is totally view/model agnostic. There are several good options for ORMs to databases, but its trivial to write a model wrapper around whatever you want. I wrote one for SimpleDB very easily.

While there are better options for doing Simple CRUD, Catalyst is quite good at building more complex web apps, and it lets me leverage the CPAN, the world's largest module repository, to get things done faster.

I love Catalyst. I won't bother trying to convince anyone that its the BEST web app framework, but I will say that its good enough to make Perl an option for new projects again.