Since Ruby was designed to fix what Matz considered mis-features of Perl 5, and the motivation for Rakudo was much the same, it's hardly surprising they're similar.
One feature of any Open Source product to consider when investing any effort in it is the supporting community. Though Ruby was considered the cure for all the world's ills a couple of years ago, the community seems to have undergone some sort of fracture. It's hard to know how deep that is without being personally involved, but it sounded quite serious. If the reference to "BIO" was about bioinformatics, the ability to use Perl 5 code and modules should reduce the amount of necessary re-working, though there are probably opportunities to rework the Perl 5 for more power and coherence in Rakudo.
