I genuinely wish there was an alternative that could gain enough traction to reach critical mass and hopefully start shipping with operating systems. I've never bothered to learn bash because it was always so damned confusing, and I just couldn't get over the idiosyncrasies when playing around with it. I wouldn't mind putting in time to learn something new and actually user-friendly.
This is quite apropos, as just last week I released a little language called 'bish' designed to overcome exactly this issue. It compiles to bash for portability, but has more modern and familiar syntax.
I actually gave fish a try after you recommended it. I can't use it in my workflow :(. Virtualenv has a bash script to initiate the environment and fish's incompatibility with bash scripts makes it impossible for me to work with it.
Even so, the single most attractive trait of bash is that it ships with almost everything. If I have to write a script on a machine with no internet, then bash is the only option. This its strongest source of staying power.
You would likely have a regular sh, be it bash in "sh-mode" or a real sh, plus likely csh and maybe ksh. You'd probably also have awk, and maybe even perl.
