Its an exceptionally ambitiously project which they are in no hurry in finishing. And that is for a good reason.
Way back in the early days, the goal was to release a usable 6.0 in a couple of years. The "there's no hurry" line is a post hoc justification from around 2006 or so.
But has the goal of Perl 6 as a project remained static? I'm relatively new to the Perl community. I know you are around since a very long time.
But I think the goal has changed from "Let's fix Perl 5" to being a more bigger goal of developing a language what Perl 5 would likely look after say 3 decades of iterations. I can't say if that is good from a purely practical perspective. But it does sound like worthwhile goal to chase.
Lets take a look at Python 3 itself. Yes they finished the project, but 5 years after that- Now what? Users don't seem to a have a valid reason to move away from 2.x series for merely small time incremental improvements, while forced to migrate bulk of the infrastructure and code for nearly ~0% productivity gains.
Perl 6 could have come out by 2005-2006, and if it were to be merely a incremental non-backwards compatible change over p5. We would be having similar posts about p6 as we are having now about Python 3. Imagine a refined, yet not that beneficial p5 breaking CPAN. I am sure you wouldn't like such a situation.
I suspect but can't entirely prove that the appearance, rapid ascent, and even more rapid burnout of Pugs made a lot of people realize that this would be a long slog. Even so, if you look back at mailing list messages or conference talks or blog posts in 2006, 2007, 2008, whenever, you'll see that the party line has always been "It's only a year or two away."
Way back in the early days, the goal was to release a usable 6.0 in a couple of years. The "there's no hurry" line is a post hoc justification from around 2006 or so.