Sure, sure, more functionality.

That's not an excuse for the startup time of a shell not being instantaneous on a modern system.

To harness the power, I write Powershell scripts (yay no more batch files), but it's just too annoying to experience the startup lag to use the shell for the simplest tasks (e.g. simply running a console application).

That shouldn't be the case.

PS: "modern object-oriented" was all the hype in the 80-s. It's not an excuse for a performance hit today :)