I write complex shell commands every day, but when it gets longer than 2-3 rows I switch to a text editor and write it in Perl instead. I see no need to use bash up to that complexity, doesn't look good in terminal.

Poorman version of multiple pipes is to write intermediate results into files, then "cat" the files as many times as needed for the following processes. I use short file names "o1", "o2" standing for output-1, output-2 and see them as temp variables.