Okay, so let me explain my position again:
Why do you want to convert these scripts in the first place. Performance ? Reliability ? Portability ? Curiosity ? Fun ?
Bash like ksh93 which I prefer and other shells are scripting languages which can be used both interactively and not. (Bourne) Shell syntax has been defined several decades ago and is doing well. Knowing it is kind of something mandatory when you work with Unix. Shells features have increased within the years but shells are still following the Unix philosophy where specialized programs using stdin/stdout/stderr and error codes are used to build complex tasks, instead of having a one fit all approach.
Perl on the other hand isn't designed to be used interactively and certainly cannot be used as a login shell (of course you can use a program written in any language including perl as your login shell, but that's off topic. plsh is written in perl but isn't perl itself). Perl was initially designed to be an improvement over sed and awk which is fine. IMHO, it has derailed when becoming a general purpose programming language.
Unlike shells which leverage them, Perl doesn't encourage to reuse available external utilities. Everything is simpler when using a dedicated perl library explaining the large span of perl modules available. This is an advantage when running in a Unix hostile environment like Windows but I don't see the point in building such a self-centric ecosystem on Unix / Gnu/Linux.
Compared to competing general purpose languages, perl is pretty famous for its cryptic syntax. Someone with a little background with programming languages can read and understand code written in other programming language he doesn't know with very little learning or even not at all. Perl is a big exception. It has many unique idioms you cannot guess or easily find in its documentation. While this might not be an issue for code you write and maintain yourself, this can prove disastrous for code that need to be updated by someone else while the original author is no more available years after that. Almost anyone can pick an old sysadmin or whatever shell script and adapt it to suit new needs. With perl, unless the code has been carefully written and commented to avoid that risk, the more productive way might be to rewrite the whole from scratch when nobody is able to understand it. That's what I meant with negative productivity, I wasn't referring to performance which is a different point. If you really demand performance, just use C for the critical parts. If you want cross platform portability, I would strongly prefer Java which is much more readable and has an even larger community and industry support.

To summarize, I see perl as an addictive/elitist language which doesn't that much worth converting existing scripts to. On the other hand, like most languages, it can be useful and efficient for some specific tasks and might still be a good choice for simple scripts called from the shell.

By the way, I'm not a mod here.