Like I said, we launched the site three months ago. Perl is working well for us, at least so far. And we launched five days ahead of schedule. But you are right, more often than not that won't be the case.
Your slides made me think you don't realize how small a niche you're targeting. Thankfully it's the internet, where even a relatively small niche can get pretty huge.
Don't listen to the Perl naysayers. There's amazing productivity to be had with it, if you can deal with it not being "cool" these days. I'd recommend checking out Catalyst ( http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/ ) and DBIx::Class (CPAN) if you haven't.
Like I said, we launched the site three months ago. Perl is working well for us, at least so far. And we launched five days ahead of schedule. But you are right, more often than not that won't be the case.