I love shell, I think it's killer feature are pipes and whoever figured out how to design so you can pipe in and out of control structures(Doug Mcilroy?) is a goddamn genius. however, after writing one to many overly clever shell scripts, I have a very clearly delineated point in which the script has become too complex and it is time to rewrite in a language better suited for the task. and that point is when I need associative arrays.

A lot of the sins of shell are due to it's primary focus as an interactive language. Many of those features that make it so nice interactively really hurt it as a scripting language.