Hi Jeff,
I really appreciate you taking the time to reply with so much detail.  I agree with a lot of what you posted.  I am not totally sure I would steer people toward dos and batch files.  I have also used those a lot, but I am trying to get more familiar with Powershell instead.  I do agree that sometimes people do just go after the latest shiny thing, but I would guess those people aren't really learning things all that well.  I would hope when they learn something new they are able to apply it to real world problems and do something practical with that knowledge.  Anyway, I do appreciate your post and perhaps an article will be born out of it.

Thanks,
Ben