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."
The idea that it would be a series of incremental improvements to Perl 5 ended around 2001, and certainly by 2002 at the latest:
http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/11/perl6rfc.html
The grand unification of runtimes (Ponie) had failed long before the announcement of its demise in 2006:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.ponie.dev/2006/08/msg487...
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."