Named pipes and tee (or gnu parallel, depending on the problem) make this semantically much clearer. It's so much better than bracket-and-sed-hell spread out over different lines.
It doesn't necessarily -- I just meant that if you have <(<(...) <(...)) type structures then adding a punctuation-jumble like command in the middle of each subsubshell is a good way to murder readability quickly. Sed, and to a lesser extent, awk, tend to be good examples of tools that (can) use a _lot_ of brackets and symbols...