I see the point and to a certain extent agree in theory. But every improvement feels like it's improved on something that just didn't need to be improved, some things become easier, but others become worse. Along the way the simplicity of text streams becomes lost.
I can see a case where passing around structured data could make sense, but Powershell definitely takes things to far by passing around full .net classes that have functionality.
This is a common complaint about PS/elvish/etc, but I’m not sure it makes sense. Is that “simple text stream” tab delimited data? CSV? JSON? XML?
At the end of the day, what you have isn’t just a “simple” text stream; you have a more complex data structure serialized into text, which will need to be parsed by each command in the pipeline for any non-trivial processing.
Quite often, yes it's just text. 90% of the time you're only a string split away from having the structure you need. Most of the more complicated systems are chasing that 10% but complicating the 90%.
