I've heard people say that there isn't really any alternative to this kind of complexity for command line tools, but people who say that have never really tried the alternative, something like PowerShell. I have plenty of complaints about PowerShell, but passing structured data around and easily being able to operate on structured data without having to hold metadata information in my head so that I can pass the appropriate metadata to the right command line tools at that right places the pipeline isn't among my complaints³.

Somewhat disingenuous.  I mean, yes, that's true, but on the other hand it means that you have to keep the "what Powershell commands operate on what structure" in your head instead, since you can no longer assume the pipelines to be a universal interface.

Same basic problem as CMS Pipelines.  Fantastically powerful, and nowhere near as easy to compose good functionality as "it's just a byte stream."

Adam