Questions about PEAR & Composer

Hi Composer, Packagist & PEAR people,

I'm giving a talk next month about dependency management in PHP.
http://www.northeastphp.org/talks/view/21/Package-Management-in-PHP-Better-Late-than-Never

I want to make sure my talk is accurate & covers the right things.  To that
end, I have some questions for you.  Please feel free to answer what you
wish and ignore those that don't apply or are not related to your project
(or answer all, I welcome all input :).

PEAR Questions
==============
My talk is not about PEAR per se but I want to touch on it as it's an
obvious precursor to Composer.
1. Why did PEAR not catch on more widely?  Were technical limitations like
lack of namespaces a major factor or was it primarily cultural? (For what
it's worth I've used PEAR myself; Auth & MDB2 packages among others).
2. What were some of PEAR's most notable successes?
3. What's a good example of a popular project that relies heavily on PEAR
today (or in the past)?
4. How is PEAR different than Composer/Packagist?
5. What does the future hold for PEAR & what is its role if Composer
continues on its trajectory towards being the de facto dependency
management tool in PHP (and package repo with Packagist)?

Composer/Packagist Questions
============================
1. What was the impetus behind developing Composer?
2. Is Laravel the best example of a project that embraces modular/package
based development or is there another you'd recommend looking at?
3. What [types of] libraries would you like to see on Packagist that aren't
there currently?
4. How is Composer/Packagist different from PEAR?
5. What's on the roadmap for Composer?

Thank you very much for your input!  I have used Composer & Packagist on a
work project but only on a limited basis.  I am excited about this trend in
the PHP community & am giving a talk about it not because I'm a top expert
in the topic, but because I think it's an important topic and want more
people to think about it and use package systems.

When my talk outline is finished I would be happy to share it for review;
the last thing I want to do is misrepresent anyone's project!

Thanks again,

Sequoia