> I just didn't feel the need to stick with it.

So, to touch on that, no contest that for a while now, you can have a well paying job only writing python. (And perhaps even never going through a formal course on it.) That has worked for many people.

> There must be a reason why they made sigils more "traditional" in Perl 6, for example.

Eh. Sigils are even more present / visible in perl 6. And other compact notation devices. All the way to making up your own unicode-based line noise when it serves. Which it does.