I have a bunch of scripts which are written in standard shell, and for simple stuff, it's fine. But as soon as it starts doing file name manipulation, or working with collections of files (say finding the age of the most recently changed file in a directory, and checking how long ago that was and changing color-extended attributes of the enclosing directory so projects untouched in over a month turn grey...), and you have people on the network who name files by copying and pasting from word documents (I didn't even know you could put a newline in a filename!), I've found python to be much more reliable and easy to write correctly.
What you described is exactly what I mean by simple stuff where shell is ideal. People generally find perl or python easier for those tasks because they took the time to learn perl or python, but didn't take the time to learn sh.
