In my experience of the big problems is that it's so hard and inconvenient to call other programs and capture/process or print-to-stdout (as required) its outpu

In my experience of the big problems is that it's so hard and inconvenient to call other programs and capture/process or print-to-stdout (as required) its output from WSH (javascript or vbscript). Also, if cscript had been the default WSH handler (rather than wscript), that would've made it much more like batch files. It's in the details - I tried for years to switch to WSH over batch files, but each time it's those little annoying things that make me switch back.