The best thing to do for advocacy is to not make the situation seem like something that it isn't or push people to Perl merely because you like the language for everything else it can do.
Frameworks exist to give you a conceptual perspective on the design and implementation of your application. I divide the framework market into three major segments, and you have to figure out which segment you want to talk about:
Those who want as-close-to-turnkey web applications as they can get with as little work as possible.
Those who want lots of knobs and dials to customize just about anything they can imagine.
There's also a hybrid market segment in the middle where people want some flexibility, but not so much that they have to design too much on their own.
Perl does very well for the people who want to heavily customize everything. Something like CGI::Prototype is very nice for this because it doesn't care about how or what you do as long as you can figure out what you want to do next (e.g. stay on this page because there is an error, complete the purchase, return the search results, whatever). CGI::Prototype doesn't even care if you are using HTTP or HTML. I know that Randal Schwartz easily adapted it as an XML server using XPath.
Catalyst is for the hybrid market. It makes most of the design decisions for you, but you can still plug in some major components and customize some of the stuff. Most people probably don't care about most knobs and dials, and most web applications out there are probably topologically similar and fit into a Catalyst mindset. Most of the people who think that they have odd requirements can probably use Catalyst.
That first market segment, the almost-turnkey one, is the one you're thinking about. They want pre-defined widgets for calendars, geo-controls, syndicators, and so on. For those people, life is tough in almost every language because they have to completely accept all the decisions that someone else made without even knowing their problem. The Perl community certainly sucks at making decisions for you, but that's also one of the reasons Perl is successful. I like pre-defined widgets, but I've never really liked the sets of pre-defined widgets. I like this calendar control in this set, but this map control from this other set. Usually, the people in this segment quickly find out they want to be in the middle segment.
Although I'm mostly in the Perl world, if I had to get back into large-scale web applications, I'd use Seaside, a Smalltalk framework. I remember one night in Florida Randal and I were sitting at a bar and he was telling me about Seaside and I was throwing every objection I could think of at him, and he easily answered every one one of them. All of his answers led back to the initial design of Seaside, too, so they weren't hacks or add-ons or could-bes. I describe Seaside as the web framework we'd get if Dr. Who went back to 1994 and fixed every stupid thing we ever thought about web applications and gave us a completely different yet smart evolutionary path. There's too many advantages to list here, and Randal is more than willing to talk your ear off about anything Smalltalk. For an example of what you can do, check out DabbleDB.