500 records isn't a large dataset. Not even close. Large would be orders of millions to billions. And yes, I have had to munge datasets that large on many occasions.

> But a quick translation to straight awk gives cleaner code, more power, easier conversion to a script, and access to a small library of awk-based utilities I've acumulated.

- cleaner: only if you find awk readable. Plenty of people don't. Plenty of people find Go or Python more readable.

- more powerful: again depends. You wouldn't have multithreading builtin like pipelines would. And Python and Go are undoubtedly more powerful than awk. I'm not knocking awk here, just being pragmatic.

- easer conversion to a script: at which point you might as well skip awk entirely and jump straight to Go or Python (or any other programming language)

- and access to a small library of awk-based utilities I've accumulated: that only benefits you. If you're having to sell the benefits of awk to someone then odd are they don't have that small library already to hand ;)

> We've spent far more time discussing this than coding, let alone running, it.

Some of the larger datasets I've had to process have definitely taken longer to munge than my reply here has taken to type :)

Disclaimer: I've honestly not got a problem with awk, I used to use it heavily 20 years ago. But these days its value is diminishing and a lot of the awk evangelists seem to miss the point of why awk isn't well represented in blog posts any more. It's both more verbose than pipelining to coreutils and less powerful than a programming language -- it's that weird middle ground that doesn't provide much value to most people aside those who are already invested into the awk language. Some might see that as a loss but personally I see that as demonstrating the strength of all the other tools we have at our disposal these days.