I kinda love it in theory.

Will be trying this out.

I do find it funny however that awk is lumped together with these small use case tools like sed, grep, tr, cut, and rev, since awk can be used to replace all of these tools and is it's own language.

I don't think the emphasis should be on simplicity, but rather on understandability (which long awk commands are not either).

If you give someone a bash script, they should be able to know exactly what the code will do when they read the script without having to run it or cat out the source it might need to parse. Using ubiquitous tools that many people understand is a good step.

Sadly awk is installed by default in most distros and tools like jq and jc would require installation.