I genuinely wish there was an alternative that could gain enough traction to reach critical mass and hopefully start shipping with operating systems. I've never bothered to learn bash because it was always so damned confusing, and I just couldn't get over the idiosyncrasies when playing around with it. I wouldn't mind putting in time to learn something new and actually user-friendly.
This is quite apropos, as just last week I released a little language called 'bish' designed to overcome exactly this issue. It compiles to bash for portability, but has more modern and familiar syntax.
See https://github.com/tdenniston/bish for the repo and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166386 for some previous discussion.
The language is still brand new and under active development. It's not stable yet.