Completely agree. For work,we use mostly C# and Visual Studio. It's honestly a blessing. It really makes hammering out stuff and debugging a quicker process and not a headache.

For my own hobby stuff, I'll always be a sucker for C++ and then on rare occasions I'll go back to my roots in Qbasic and have some fun.

I actually do not hate PowerShell (not really a whole lot of other options built into Windows Server to choose from instead of it though :) ). It has a somewhat steep learning curve but it's basically a .NET scripting language. Coming from someone who writes C# code for a living, it's not the worst they could have done.

The command line and related tools have been the weakest link on Windows

Completely agree. I'm a Linux guy and the company I work for is by and large users of Linux servers. I have had to create a bunch of Powershell scripts for our few Windows servers over the years and I have to say it's a godsend compared to before. It's not perfect, but compared to creating command line batch files, it's a welcome advancement.