I like bash, but I think I understand the hate -- it's the slippery slope of "gluing real applications" to "I can write this all in bash!". Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I enjoy the section of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide which explains how Bash has sparse arrays which "are useful in spreadsheet-processing software".[0] Because someone out there is apparently writing spreadsheet-processing software in Bash?