I use shell for simple things like "do this for all the files in here". shellscripts for repeated stuff and wgeb it gets complicated i turn to programming languages like python

Handling of maps/dictionaries could probably be improved. The current solution feels quite clunky.

I don't understand the question. There is no perfection in software.

And what does "utilities in bash" mean? Do you mean features of specifically the bash-shell? Do you mean shell-tools in general? Or shells in general?

If you're talking about bash the shell scripting language then yes. In fact, I assert that removing dumb "features" is the only way to make it better.

Not really a utility per se, but I really really wish that echo {1..n} would run echo n number of times with the current index as the argument instead of expanding to a single string that gets printed.

I know you can do a for loop as a one liner but I somehow never get it right the first time and turns out to be a bit of a PIA.

I don't really use bash anymore for anything complex. The cognitive load of remembering all the commands and options is just too high. I simply describe what I need to do to claude code, and it gives me the exact one-liner I need. For me, that's the ultimate "utility" we've been looking for.