grep and regular expressions in general are a great example of something that Unix seems to excel at but that leaves me cold: shitloads of power, but all dependent on learning arbitary syntax by the bucketloads, thus requiring a time investment I just don't have to make.

I marvel at and am impressed by the things that clever shell command chains or carefully constructed regexes can do, but the gap between being able to do those things and when you're awkwardly hunting through man pages and 40 year old docs just to do basic things is huge, and I so rarely need to actually do those things that putting that kind of time in is rarely worth it. Is 3 hours to save 5 minutes really worth my time?

99% of my use of grep is just a simple string search. I don't need an entire esoteric programming language to do that.