The thing about the Unix shell is that not only is it extremely power and flexible, it is designed to work with pure ascii so it can used on many remote, bare bones machines and it really is there running on many remote, bare bones machines. And given all this there are many people with strong skills in that shell and a strong attachment to that shell (for rational and irrational reasons imho). With all this, it would be hard to replace this shell even with something that's better. That actually makes me sad since actually dislike using it since for all its power, much of it is annoying and bass-ackwards imho again.
It's unbelievably verbose and the documentation sucks hard. Also, working on remote machines is unreasonably annoying. It is decent at manipulating structured data though.
