perl one-liners are pretty powerful and can replace awk/sed/cut/tr/etc. That being said, then you have to remember which command-line options you should give perl (was it -lane to do X, or was it -pie, or something else entirely?).
But yeah, the perl rabbit hole goes as deep as you want to, and in some sense it makes it more difficult to say "screw it, I'm redoing this in a real language" as complexity rises. And then you end up with a thousand lines of line noise.
