I find the current shell world obsolete. grep/pipes/sed/awk are byzantine. Most REPL environments are better. I'd like a terminal to go straight to Python REPL and run just Python commands. Would be much simpler.
Ok wait
Awk and sed are entire programming languages, so like, ok... fair. It hardly seems fair to call grep byzantine to me, since although it is based around a DSL, it's an extremely common one that you'll find in every programming language, including Python. But fine, regexps aren't for everyone.
But pipes?? What's the problem with pipes? Don't you ever compose functions in your code or call map() over your data structures? How are pipes any trickier than the kinds of control flow you might use in Python?