Maintenance horrors. Its only because you can't find good Perl coders. Sucks to be you.

We write maintainable Perl. Even the stuff 10 years old is still easily maintainable, a bit archaic, but easy to maintain.

And you are talking different budgets and types of expenditures. Capital Expenditures are typically horribly hard to push through and justify. If you've got wetware already working... its easy to have them fix it.

Though, you don't have good (as in real ones not "think I am") Perl programmers.