My experience was always the complete opposite, but I've avoided cpan.org in lieu of metacpan for years now because metacpan has a better experience overall. It likely changed over the years as the majority of Perl programmers switched to metacpan, which seems to go back around 7 years at least. According to alexa,com there's been a large shift in the last year or so, and metacpan.org is serving something like 3-4 times the amount of traffic. Additionally, each page is displaying much more info (such as dependencies, cpantesters platform testing statistics, etc).