I can see the benefit of dropping to a command block to, say, run a command and filter the output with some | grep | awk | sort of whatever, and then seamlessly come back up to a more fully featured language to deal with that data.
Python scripts win when you actually need to handle errors, or non trivial output parsing, or when the concept of “list of things” doesn’t fit neatly into the “lines of text / pipe symbol” paradigm.
I try to think of it like Donkey Kong. Every time you do something like this:
var=$(command | awk -vID=$ID ‘$6 ~ /foo/ and $7 == ID {print $1 “ “ $2} | head -3)
If it’s a truism that most shell scripts are better off written in Python, it’s just as true that all Python scripts are better off as reusable modules (that may also be standalone scripts.)
The syntax can be weird, but I still think it really shines in cases like these.
Part of this may also be that I've never learned to do a great job at organizing a BASH shell "project". So, those often get unwieldy maintenance nightmares. At plenty of time me and my peers have agreed: when your BASH script exceeds [some low number of] lines, find another language.
Again, it matters a lot what your team's culture and comforts are. If that's BASH for you, then r.e.s.p.e.c.t.
That's the thing - I don't see how you can do that. The command blocks return nil or error, but not the output, so that you'd have to dump that to a temporary file, scrape the file separately, remember to delete it, and so on. I can make it work, but it doesn't live up to the idea of seamlessness.