I can't speak for others but personally I've never built up enough motivation to learn shell scripts (and related hackery like awk and sed) properly, even thoug

I can't speak for others but personally I've never built up enough motivation to learn shell scripts (and related hackery like awk and sed) properly, even though I've learnt maybe 5-10 programming languages quite well and use the shell interactively all the time. I can't explain with certainty why, but I think it's due to lack of discoverability, inconsistent conventions for flags and positionals, esoteric syntax for simple control flow, lack of errors/feedback for things like undefined variables, no scoping/namespaces, unclear type system (not asking for much, strings, bools and ints would suffice). That said, piping/streaming is amazing and often better than in modern languages. In short, it's quite different from other imperative languages - the design feels arbitrary and the learnings non-transferable, even though I know it is useful and ubiquitous.