I'm not. "Everything is a string" is an incredibly powerful worldview for tying systems together where those systems never put any thought into interoperability

I'm not. "Everything is a string" is an incredibly powerful worldview for tying systems together where those systems never put any thought into interoperability. Any realistic bash alternative would either need to rewrite the entire user land with a more structured exchange format like JSON or .NET objects, or ship with adapters for most every command line tool we use.