If I measure time to solve a problem and not line count, using a language like Python or Ruby might be 2x the lines , for a line count approaching zero anyways, not sure that matters. Performance is comparable and I don't need to relearn anything and someone else who doesn't know awk/sed doesn't need to learn it.

And when one is using awk/sed that script is often invoked from a shell, bash for instance. And since the awk/sed can't hold its own as a general purpose programming language, now I am writing bash code, a personal sin.

Awk/sed made sense for the time and place they are from, but things have changed.