I can't even count the number of times I made a short script/tool for some task that could have been accomplished by stringing together some highly arcane comma

I can't even count the number of times I made a short script/tool for some task that could have been accomplished by stringing together some highly arcane command line invocations. Sometimes, I had legitimate reasons for this because the "unix way" had weird edge cases or unwanted behavior. Other times I just felt like it, or I didn't know a viable alternative existed. I remember when I was working on a web server project in the late nineties, one of my first commercial gigs, the whole thing was done in Borland Delphi. As the maintenance programmer came in to take over, he berated me publicly several times for not using regular expressions to do string manipulation. The language did not even have regex support as far as I recall, and as he replaced my very simple and easily-debuggable string routines with absurd regexes in combination with an arcane regex library, I felt like the most worthless programmer ever. Worse yet, people were praising him for his assertiveness and competence. And then following his "refactoring", over the next weeks, horrible string manipulation bugs and exploits started happening in production. Turns out, he introduced lots of problems and nobody could fix them. As far as I know the project was plagued with these kinds of bugs until it went offline years later. The loudest hecklers are often the most successful at projecting an appearance of competence that may not necessarily be warranted. They derive energy and peer recognition from publicly berating colleagues for decisions. Whether they are factually correct or not, little is gained by letting them drag you down. It's not the end of the world. Most of the time, there are many ways to achieve a result in programming. Writing a little script is certainly a valid solution, and if it makes you more productive for doing a specific thing, or even just as a learning exercise, why not?