Well, those were always planned features, they just never got around to them, or they never got enough attention before the project basically died out.
As for not moving in the right direction, it was probably far too ambitious to try to develop something like Parrot and something like Perl 6 at the same time, with dependencies on each other. Both projects would have been better served if they did their own things, and Parrot was just seen as "a good candidate for a second implementation" from the Perl 6 perspective, rather than the primary target. It's hard to target a VM that's not done, and it's hard as a VM to support a language that isn't finalized (and has crazy requirements).
As for not moving in the right direction, it was probably far too ambitious to try to develop something like Parrot and something like Perl 6 at the same time, with dependencies on each other. Both projects would have been better served if they did their own things, and Parrot was just seen as "a good candidate for a second implementation" from the Perl 6 perspective, rather than the primary target. It's hard to target a VM that's not done, and it's hard as a VM to support a language that isn't finalized (and has crazy requirements).