Apocalypse 1 came out in 2001. 1998 is a bit closer to the Absolute Destiny Apocalypse, which now that I think about it might have had an impact on the naming. And yes, 15 years is a bit too long for most people to stay excited.

It probably won't be like your recollection that much. The general concepts have emerged unchanged, but a lot of things have happened in the interim. Lots of input from languages like Haskell and Java through various contributors. And then there was the whole multi-core processor thing, that makes parallel computing a major feature. The original idea was one VM that would run everything, Parrot. Now Parrot is dead (joke complete), and Rakudo Perl 6 runs on 3 VMs (with Javascript coming soon).

If you want a good example of how the grammars turned out, take a look at JSON::Tiny.