I get the point of "either Bash or straight to a real programming language". That's what I do too, for automation. I like how PowerShell makes one-off tasks easier which would otherwise be the typical pipe of cat, grep, sed, awk etc.

About objects vs. text: I'm convinced that objects are vastly superior. There was a comment about this here with good arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907248