To me it's about half way there. The things I like about it the least are the ones that are like bash ("I'd just like to interject for a moment, what you're referring to as Bash is in fact called POSIX shell").

A common argument in defense of its weirdness is that "shell scripting isn't like serious software development", but I don't understand that either.

I use shell scripts a good amount because "it's right there" is a strong argument, but in a lot of cases things that seem like they would be trivial take forever, are horribly hacky and leave me wishing I just had written a Python script right away instead.

I really don't get why people like shell scripts.