It's not really good, but calling it abysmal is just too negative in my opinion :) It does get a lot of things right after all, especially in the "not everything is text" department. Also a lot of things wrong (my main gripes would be a lot of the syntax in general, case insensitive, usually more than a couple of ways to achieve the same thing). So in the end the learning experience/curve for me was the same as for bash (or languages like C++) and just as long/steep probably: feels like suffering until you've learned all the caveats by heart and in the process of doing that also learned how to actually use it, then it becomes ok to use. After that process I'm leaning towards favoring PS over bash though. Now it's possible there are already other shells which get more things right but I really doubt that in my lifetime I'm still going to spend (waste?) time on learning yet another shell. Or it must be convincingly good and provably fast to learn :P