Thank you for sharing.
In terms of performance for very basic scripts (silent software installs, 5-10 lines, registry patching, etc.), I see the performance chart as:
Batch > VBScript > Powershell
in terms of speed. I wish I had tried Jscript, because the ironic Javascript is taking over the world could have meant retro hipster superiority (and scary you could integrate JScript and VBScript into the same script by embedding them in XML type directives and using the WSF system). Now that was scarier than any of this.
As an aside, outside of speed, how do you sign scripts for clients? I love that Powershell encouraged it, but every person I have met has not bought into Powershell, and most certainly invokes "disable the cert check" completely command for all executed Powershell scripts.