I have only ever used Powershell when I had no other options, but a decent number of the APIs feel designed by someone who has never used a terminal. Like they were begrudgingly fulfilling the objective without ever imagining a real use-case.

Naturally, I cannot produce an example off hand, but I was pretty disappointed the last time I had to reach for it and found that a few "obvious" workflows seemed more hacky than I would have expected for a clean-slate terminal language design.

PowerShell always felt like it's optimized for scripting rather than interactive CLI/REPL use. It's great when the complexity of what you do warrants writing a script that can be debugged, tested, and reused... but then there are better scripting languages. What is good for REPL ergonomics of one-liner juggling is usually bad for scripting and readability, and vice versa. Can't design for both.

Calculators had the same problem when they got too powerful for their own good and feature creep made them outgrow their use case in the world of personal computers (see TI or modern advanced calculator apps like Qualculate). They're pretty awkward compared to HPs that were designed for expressing a simple problem in fewest keystrokes with great attention to detail like interactive inversion and repetition.

I'm sure there are uglier incantations, but I recently discovered this is the correct way to run a traceroute in powershell

Test-NetConnection -ComputerName dns.google -TraceRoute

From what I get, the Designer hated Bash specifically. (As some1 who had 2 use it, can related) The syntax confusing, clunky & slow. Said guy then proceeds to build a Shell which is even slower, the Syntax more convoluted than anything else

What do you compare it with? Because bash is just terrible.