Comment by jleader

You make it sound like CPAN has "an aggressive authoritarian requirement on documentation, coding standards, and unit testing" (or at least that Lisp would need that to make a hypothetical LPAN successful).

CPAN definitely does not have that. What it does have are fairly strong social pressures in favor of those things, and extensive frameworks making it easier to provide those things (I'm thinking in particular of cpantesters.org providing free cross-platform unit testing support for all of CPAN).