It's even more than that: text formatting allows the use of generic filtering and text processing tools. Whereas if you are using objects, you will tend to use

It's even more than that: text formatting allows the use of generic filtering and text processing tools. Whereas if you are using objects, you will tend to use less on-the-fly command line composition, and write or reuse more tools dedicated to one particular object or the other. In the end I'm not sure keeping the structuring as the default use case yields an usage so much improved in the real world, because if you work on a broad number of types you will tend to need to know more specialised tools, instead of generic ones, and have less higher-order composition tools at your disposal. Now of course you can always format to text from your structured object, but this does not matter. What matters is what is convenient in the proposed UI, and what is mainly practiced in the real world because of such convenience and the amplification loop it creates between tools authors and users. Also some objects are originally handled in text form, and their structured decomposition is extremely complex compared to an informal description and the naturally refinable heuristic which comes with it. For example you can grep into a source code in any language (with more or less efficiency depending on the language, but at least if there is a unique symbol you will find it), whereas trying to get and handle it in a structured way basically means you would need half of a (modular) compiler, and a huge manual to describe the structure, and possibly a non trivial amount of code to actually do the lookup. The PowerShell approach is not all-bad, though, and obviously there are some usages where it superior to text based shells. But for a day to day usage as a general purpose shell, and a programmer shell, I'll stick to the Unix approach.