In part, my preference for the simplicity of cmd.exe is related to my preference for the simplicity of my preferred editor: textpad. I prefer my 'simple', non-programmable editor because it is non-programmable. It is because I do not get tempted to try and perform tasks that actually require a programming language, and then waste time either jumping through hoops trying to make an inadequate tool do what I need; or having to perform a wholesale conversion to a proper programming language, once I reach the limits of the editors built-in facility.

Ok that makes sense. For me personally there's still a vast amount of tasks that make more sense to do in the shell than in an actual program, but I can certainly understand the other opinion.

Finally, I infinitely prefer the line editing, command line history and cut&paste facilities of a windowed cmd.exe session to anything available on *nix.

This one does still puzzle me, because:

Every keyboard I've used in the past 20+ years has had arrow keys; home & end; delete & insert; pgup & pgdn; a set of programmable function keys. These keys perform the same tasks in just about every application I use

arrows,home/end,pgup/pgdown work the same in most linux terminals as in the windows commands prompt (though I do admit that some may not be set up right by default). The functions keys in the command prompt do not appear to do anything remotely similar to what they do in other apps. (F3 isn't search like it is in most apps, F4 does some delete thing which I've never seen anywhere else)

Cut and paste is probably just familiarity; I very much prefer being able to just select with the mouse and right-click to paste over have to explictly click "mark" first.

Command history seems a lot more powerful in bash; cmd seems limited to a simple up/down arrow? But that might be another simpler-is-better thing for you?

Overall that was a very enlightening answer. I'd been trying to think of functionality that was _missing_ from bash, while it turned out to be not about that at all.