Yes, we work with structured data - especially JSON. Thank goodness we have jq to deal with that. Need to work with APIs? There's always wget and curl and should you need anything more extensive you can create a javascript file and execute it with node - all from within bash. Bottom line, I can do everything I need to do from the command line or from a bash script without having the bash maintainers needing to worry about creating and maintaining the functionality of jq, wget, curl, etc. within bash. It seems to me that the "problem" is more elegant than the "solution."