I totally agree. awk, sed, grep are amazing and it astonishes me how many people aren't fluently able to write scripts in it. I used to be in that camp few months earlier and I used to write everything in Python, but one day, I determined to learn shell scripting and I loved it.

awk::Python what Java::Python. What we can do in 10 lines of Python can be done in one line of awk and it doesn't have to be unreadable!

Main pain in the neck is finding a good tutorial. As usual, I started documenting what I learnt in an end to end guide here, https://github.com/thewhitetulip/awk-anti-textbook