I look forward to using your enhanced tools, once they're ubiquitious and fully-featured.
More seriously I can't imagine what "points" you're trying to score. Yes the shell is good at launching external processes, and yes the built-in facilities for other things are lacking in some ways. On the whole people work around them by using perl, python, and other tools.
It might be, as you say, that people resort to using such external scripts/languages because their shells suck. But I have to ask: So what? They get the job done. A "super-shell" doesn't need to be present, even if people do things the "hard-way".
When did I every say or imply that I was writing my own shell? There are already ample real programming languages to use that can fork off and manage sub-processes just fine, thank you, instead of writing ridiculously inefficient complex hard to maintain un-modular shell scripts.
Why would I waste my time trying to fix something that's fundamentally flawed, and that nobody would use because it wasn't "standard"?
We already have Python, JavaScript, Perl, etc. Even PHP is overwhelmingly better and more modular than bash! Why try to put lipstick on a pig like bash?
My point (which I already stated) is that the "Unix Philosophy" in intellectually bankrupt, not that the shell should be extended with string manipulation and floating point to make it unnecessary to fork "sed", "awk" and "bc".
More seriously I can't imagine what "points" you're trying to score. Yes the shell is good at launching external processes, and yes the built-in facilities for other things are lacking in some ways. On the whole people work around them by using perl, python, and other tools.
It might be, as you say, that people resort to using such external scripts/languages because their shells suck. But I have to ask: So what? They get the job done. A "super-shell" doesn't need to be present, even if people do things the "hard-way".