PowerShell sort of cheats, which enables the nice object pipelines; all cmdlets are .net modules that are run within the same runtime. That makes PowerShell much closer to "normal" programming languages with repls than traditional shells. That is also why PowerShell model is not directly a good fit to the UNIX world.
I would like to see more work done in the realm of object shells (and have some ideas myself), especially around designs that meld in more the UNIXy way of having independent communicating processes. But it is a difficult problem domain, and many approaches would involve rewriting lot of the base system we take for granted that is just huge amount of work.
PowerShell had the benefit of having stuff like WMI, COM, the whole .NET, and of course all the resources, funding and marketing from MS. Even then it has seemed to have been an uphill struggle, despite there being far more a need for PS in the Windows world.
I would like to see more work done in the realm of object shells (and have some ideas myself), especially around designs that meld in more the UNIXy way of having independent communicating processes. But it is a difficult problem domain, and many approaches would involve rewriting lot of the base system we take for granted that is just huge amount of work.
PowerShell had the benefit of having stuff like WMI, COM, the whole .NET, and of course all the resources, funding and marketing from MS. Even then it has seemed to have been an uphill struggle, despite there being far more a need for PS in the Windows world.