I've been known to say that if you know a complex tool like Perl well, then go right ahead and use it for your own scripting purposes.

Most of my pipe-like processing is one-off and involves SQL and numerous trips through an editing session in vi (regexp replace FTW! when they work...). If it has to become something re-usable, then it gets turned into something much more robust, like a PHP script or maybe a bash script. I leave little pipe tools to things they are good at (grep comes to mind).

Wade.