I love it for both programming and scripting. It's probably not the best option a lot of the time, but I still find myself going back to write things in PowerShell. I don't find myself running into any of the issues you bring up in my experiences. Everyone has something specific they prefer, though. I find coming back to and reading foreign PowerShell to be quite natural, and rarely taxing if formatted well.

I can't pinpoint what I like so much about it either... It just draws me in well. It does devolve in readability when trying to squeeze out every drop of speed, though.

IPC is what I find to be the most challenging for me in PoSH, but I'm not sure if that's due to incompetence.