I love pipelines. I don't know the elaborate sublanguages of find, awk, and others, to exploit them adequately. I also love Python, and would rather use Python than those sublanguages.
Piping is great if you memorize the (often very different) syntax of every individual tool and memorize their flags, but in reality unless it's a task you're doing weekly, you'll have to go digging through MAN pages and documentation every time. It's just not intuitive. Still to date if I don't use `tar` for a few months, I need to lookup the hodge podge of letters needed to make it work.
Whenever possible, I just dump the data in Python and work from there. Yes some tasks will require a little more work, but it's work I'm very comfortable with since I write Python daily.
Your project looks like, but honestly iPython already lets me run shell commands like `ls` and pipe the results into real python. That's mostly what I do these days. I just use iPython as my shell.
The lispers/schemers in the audience may be interested in Rash https://docs.racket-lang.org/rash/index.html which lets you combine an sh-like language with any other Racket syntax.
I'm developing a shell based on these ideas: https://github.com/geophile/marcel.