These days I often catch myself thinking "Why are we doing X in Python?".

It's just because doing it in bash would be terrible because bash.

In one place we have basically implemented shell script as an array of arrays of strings. More or less a shell AST that we the assemble into exec calls. This allows us to say things about the different actions and turn on and off things like "this particular thing here should be silent this time around". Also it lets us DRY things up, and hook into parts of our (Python-written) build system for sources of knowledge.

It is horrible. But I can't argue that it's worse than going Full Bash.

And then I think that I wish there were an in-between that would be convenient for shell-like things yet have proper orthogonal language constructs and higher-order concepts.

And then I think that it's too bad I would never be able to get my colleagues on the !tcltk train.