indeed, the more I looked at Apple’s setup (see this post) , the more inconsistent it looks… and as we have seen, they are happy to mess about with it, as its not a ‘core part’ of their OS… I think it’s possible Apple provide it as a useful ‘system admin scripting tool’ (*), rather than something for ‘application development’
(*) Ive worked at places that used python exclusively for this, they needed more than shell scripting, but weren’t programmers, and python fitted really well, as its got some really nice ‘hooks’ into the OS.