I put off learning awk for literal decades because I knew perl, but then I picked it up and wish I had done so earlier. I still prefer perl for a lot of use cases, but in one-liners, awk's syntax makes working with specific fields a lot more convenient than perl's autosplit mode. `$1` instead of `$F[0]`, basically.
Reordering and splicing are common enough that it’s easier just to always use awk, since the cost of rewriting one to the other is significantly higher.
Maybe if all you want to do is unconditionally extract certain columns from your data. But even in that case cut doesn't let you use a regular expression as the field delimiter.
