I’ve had to learn heavy duty bashing for work, and happily did take the plunge. However, they also had me learn PHP and I’ll drop this as a hook and line for OP: you can do shell-script duties with PHP also, and once you hit your head on sed enough times, I hope you remember me telling this. All that string manipulation is much nicer with PHP functions, and for running shell commands there is shell_exec(). :)

I recently discovered kmscon: a hardware accelerated utf-8 & emoji capable replacement for the standard Linux console. Put that on.