I really don't understand the love of one liners. Yes it's cool to see how much can be done in one line but it's so much harder to read. Isn't legibility far better than compactness?
>some_complex_tool | 'my one liner' | some_other_complex_tool > result.txt
Not putting the one-liner logic into a separate script avoids an additional lookup for someone learning what is going on, along with any deployment/path/.. dependencies to that separate script.
I don't know about most people, but interactively I use short flags and when writing Bash scripts I try hard to use long flags and will often break things up specifically for clarity.