[wvenable]

It's very powerful but the syntax is step back 20 years:

    If ($Number -gt 0) 

That's just one example. There is a lot of really confusing stuff in powershell that's entirely unnecessary. There were going for some kind of Bash-shell familiarity which, oddly enough, most Windows developers don't even have.

[colejohnson66]

I'd say the usage of -lt and the like is because angle brackets are used for piping data.

[wvenable]

The shell is a mess of symbols making any sane programming language impossible. Instead of perhaps rethinking the "mess of symbols" issue they ruined the language instead.