I tend to be pretty cautious about adopting the shiny new thing off CPAN for projects that are important to me. My experience tells me that shine often goes only skin deep, and there are problems lurking beneath. A good example from my past is IO::All. It's a great idea, because Perl's built-in IO is just fugly. But IO::All has its own set of problems, and while I may not love Perl's built-ins, at least when I have an IO problem when using them, I know the blame lies with me, not the module.
For a long time I wasn't too interested in Catalyst. Sure, it looked interesting, but the docs were weak, and more importantly, using it is an investment, or though of another way, it's a bet. Of course, nowadays, I'm enjoying Catalyst quite a bit.
The latest shiny thing I'm playing with is Moose. Again, there was documentation issue (still is, I think). The docs aren't bad, but they don't really make it clear off the bat what it could do. If you want to see a whole lot of what it does in a concise form, I'd highly recommend Stevan's slides from YAPC::EU. I checked them out today and finally everything clicked. Seeing all its cool features at once made me finally realize how I Moose could help me clean up my code. I'm still trying to figure out how to tie it together with work I've done in the past using Params::Validate, but I think that will come together eventually (and yes, I know about MooseX::Method and MooseX::Params::Validate).
