> If you have such an specific task, why not just write an "actual program" (as opposed to pipeline of scripts)?
With the pipeline you get free parallelism and it's much easier to iterate over the individual steps, run step manually, check the output, add it to the script. You can also trivially break bits into a make file for improved parellelism and incrementalism. Performance wise these tools have had a lot of work put into them, even when they're not the most efficient tool on paper they'll often beat out the most naive versions in "real" languages.
With the pipeline you get free parallelism and it's much easier to iterate over the individual steps, run step manually, check the output, add it to the script. You can also trivially break bits into a make file for improved parellelism and incrementalism. Performance wise these tools have had a lot of work put into them, even when they're not the most efficient tool on paper they'll often beat out the most naive versions in "real" languages.