I've only ever been to a few, but I found at lest two really nice: a Perl meetup in SF that wasn't really social at all but had great tech talks; and a Perl dinner (at a conference) in Vienna that had Very Odd Devs who were also super fun to talk to. People working at small regional banks can be way more eccentric than you'd guess!

It seems like all the problems you list are easy to solve, except odd devs, and I'm not sure that's a problem.

Admittedly, I'm too busy/lazy/unmotivated to solve them myself, but I can't believe there aren't some fun ones out there.