Would you mind elaborating here? I'm very honestly curious how the deal gets broken for you.
To explain my curiosity, I've long since come to the opinion that we're in the midst of a long, somewhat painful split caused by a design dissonance over improving the interactive shell UX versus creating a better environment for scripting.
We've been building alternatives around the scripting problem for ages now, perhaps most notably starting with Perl's ascendance. That legacy continues with Python, Ruby, and now many other tools. I'll still reach for bash/zsh as a scripting tool, but only when the situation absolutely will not admit an extra dependency. In my experience, the pain factor goes up far more quickly with code complexity when it's all just gotta be done in POSIX/bash land.
As for the interactive shell UX, fish is notable for simply putting its foot down and just saying "no" to the scripting side. It pushes out POSIX scripting compatibility as an external feature. Calling bash is now on the same level as calling out to {Perl, et. al.}. Whether or not fish is your cup of tea, it's inspired a bunch of competing work in the traditional interactive shells.
At the current time, the above efforts are simply going in different directions. We have numerous better options for rich automation than POSIX shell scripting. Likewise, shell scripting just gets in the way of creating better, extensible developer/admin CLI environments. It has too many quirks (hi, quoting hell!) and limitations (real data structures, please) to work well for an extensibility platform.