I don't know, is it? There are a lot of scripts that people would write in the C shell. It has a more C-like syntax also. So once people have a collection of scripts then it's hard to get rid of it. Apart from history and job control I don't think the language features are that different although they are expressed differently. For example, both languages have loops, conditionals, variables and so on. I imagine some people prefer the C-style syntax, as opposed to the ALGOL68-like syntax of the shell.

There was a reason that I put the ALGOL-like syntax in there. I always found, and this is the language design issue, that I would read a C program and get to a closing brace and I would wonder where the matching opening brace for that closing brace was. I would go scratching around looking for the beginning of the construct but you had limited visual clues as to what to look for. In the C language, for example, a closing brace could be the end of an if or switch or a number of other things. And in those days we didn't have good tools that would allow you to point at the closing brace and say 'where's the matching opening brace?'. You could always adopt an indenting convention but if you indented incorrectly you could get bugs in programs quite easily because you would have mismatching or misplaced brace. So that was one reason why I put in the matching opening and closing tokens like an if and a fi -- so all of the compound statements were closed and had unique closing tokens.

And it was important for another reason: I wanted the language to have the property that anywhere where there was a command you could replace it with any closed form command like an if ... fi or a while ... do ... done and you could make that transformation without having to go re-write the syntax of the thing that you were substituting. They have an easily identifiable start and end, like matching parentheses.

Compare current UNIX shells (programs that manipulate text) and new MS Windows Power Shell (classes that manipulate objects). Would UNIX benefit from a Power Shell approach?

The Unix environment itself doesn't really have objects ... if you look at what the shell is interfacing to, which is Unix. If objects are visible to the people writing at the shell level then it would need to support them. But I don't know where that would be the case in Unix; I have not seen them. I imagine in the Microsoft example objects are a first class citizen that are visible to the user so you want to have them supported in the scripting language that interfaces to Windows. But that is a rather generic answer to your question; I am not specifically familiar with the power shell.