[zokier]

But if we have a program that produces structured data ("ls"/"get-childitem") and a program that similarly consumes structured data ("select-column"), then I'm not sure what sort of "smartness" you would need from the pipe in between? Why would the shell need to understand that the data is somehow more than just stream of bytes?

As far as pretty-printing the final output to the user, in my opinion that is something that is better handled at terminal level instead of the shell.

Of course these are just comments based on how I imagine a reasonable object shell would function, and I really would like to hear more views on this subject because it is very likely that I might have overlooked something essential.