I suspect that this is not a case of Powershell "sucking" but it being a tool that is completely unfamiliar to you.
You say you run compare-object and you're surprised that it returns an object; Powershell is essentially an object-oriented pipeline, so a return object should always be the expected case. You say is that it's hard to coerce the object into a text-stream that you can munge, but again I suspect that your difficulties are again a misunderstanding of exactly how you should be operating in Powershell. Even me saying "coerce the object into a text-stream" is disingenuous, because what you'll end up with is almost always going to be `string[]`. Once you've thrown away all of the data contained in the object except for the one string property you want, you've thrown away all of the value of Powershell.
None of this difficulty is your fault. In bash you would "just" pipe the output of `diff` into `awk`, but that "just" is a cop-out: bash is nearly as complex as Powershell itself before you throw awk into the mix. You already know awk and bash, so it's natural to you and all of your preconceptions about how the shell should work are met.
Powershell is entirely capable of doing what you want to do with it, but it's a completely different world. If you persist with it, and you do get the hang of it, I promise you'll understand the value of the concepts behind it.
You say you run compare-object and you're surprised that it returns an object; Powershell is essentially an object-oriented pipeline, so a return object should always be the expected case. You say is that it's hard to coerce the object into a text-stream that you can munge, but again I suspect that your difficulties are again a misunderstanding of exactly how you should be operating in Powershell. Even me saying "coerce the object into a text-stream" is disingenuous, because what you'll end up with is almost always going to be `string[]`. Once you've thrown away all of the data contained in the object except for the one string property you want, you've thrown away all of the value of Powershell.
None of this difficulty is your fault. In bash you would "just" pipe the output of `diff` into `awk`, but that "just" is a cop-out: bash is nearly as complex as Powershell itself before you throw awk into the mix. You already know awk and bash, so it's natural to you and all of your preconceptions about how the shell should work are met.
Powershell is entirely capable of doing what you want to do with it, but it's a completely different world. If you persist with it, and you do get the hang of it, I promise you'll understand the value of the concepts behind it.