[vardump]

The biggest issue in PowerShell is very slow script execution startup time, 300-500ms seems to be typical. So forget about externally launching PowerShell scripts thousands of times.

The second biggest issue I've seen is generic lack of robustness and maturity. Default cmdlets do the common case nicely, but once you have something unusual in the mix things go wrong fast... By unusual, I mean things like filesystem junctions, volumes mounted into directories.

If you want colors, Write-Host is nice. Except that it goes only to console AND to (undocumented?) file id 6! (same way like stdout goes to 1, stderr to 2, etc.).

PowerShell seems to behave slightly differently in each Windows version. A script that's written for Win10 1803 might just break under 1809.

I don't have much issues with Bash etc., even sh. It performs well and is very robust. I do hate its many footguns, like how easy it is to get escaping wrong.

[JdeBP]

It very much is documented.

    Get-Help about_Redirection

Received wisdom about Write-Host, by the way, is that one rarely wants it.

[vardump]

> Received wisdom about Write-Host, by the way, is that one rarely wants it.

Yeah, totally got that. But how else you can generate colorized easy-to-read output, where yellow warnings stand out?

There should be something like Write-Host that outputs colors to console stdout handle and silently drops color properties when writing to (anonymous) pipe stdout handle.

Color escape codes could be even better.