I flashed this morning and have been working all day to get it back to my old setup.

Recursively copying a backup of the 'email' folder in /home/user/Apps prevented me from having to reconfigure my POP gmail account, which was nice.

Gizmo installed and was up and running right away.
I've found some armel compiled .debs of perl which are also working great.

I put this upgrade off because I assumed it would lead to an unstable and mostly unusable system. (The name Hacker Edition seems to imply that) Not True! It's working as good or better than 2006.