I gave up on bash (more precisely on bashisms. edit: and because of bashims) and moved to dash or whatever is at /bin/sh. If it can't be done with ash/dash then I look into Python or node or PHP or what fits the situation best.
I did the same. I believe the biggest selling point of shell over other scripting languages is its availability on so many platforms. Unfortunately bashisms have ruined the effort of writing a one-size-fits-all script. So I, too, moved to POSIX shell syntax for the small problems and another shell scripting language for the bigger problems.
Bash is very widely available. If you use bashisms like arrays, just use bash as the first line.