... and then recreate the scripting language...

I was just thinking does this not sound like a shell language? Using | instead of .function()

Sure. But how do you write that in a way that is expressive, terse, and readable all at once? Nothing beats x | y | z or (-> x y z). The speed of both writing and reading (and comprehending), the sheer simplicity, is what makes pipelining useful in the first place.

I like partial application like in Standard ML, but it also means, that one must be very careful with the order of arguments, unless we get a variant of partial application, that is flexible enough to let you specify which arguments you want to provide, instead of always assuming the first n arguments. I use "cut" for this in Scheme. Threading/Pipelines are still very useful though and can shorten things and make them very readable.

for loops are also gotos with less power, yet we usually prefer them.