It was difficult to implement !! and !$ in fish (I rarely actually used them in bash, so it wasn't an issue for me) and I know others who found that annoying. However if you dig around, there are a couple of solutions on Stack Overflow and blog posts that add in that functionality using plugins or functions. It's not exactly the same, but some of them work pretty well.
You may be underestimating the importance of these particular operators to experienced users. I at least would be very dissuaded from trying an alternate shell without a simple way to enable these.
