You can hate Powershell, and yet it can still be incredibly useful to you. I use it for small but important one-liner types of things or in very minor scripts. It really can't compare to C# so as soon as there is any complexity or significant potential reuse at all I switch to C#. Also, importantly, Powershell is so funky that I WANT to recreate solutions from scratch every time, otherwise I forget the quirks, of which there are many. I have heard other people say this too!
Examples of what it's really good for:
Ad hoc text processing. Occasionally people hand me a large data or SQL file, and they want it manipulated into a different form, sometimes in really complicated ways. This alone has saved me incredible amounts of time. It often involves lots of adhoc one-liners and intermediate files. Now that people know I can do this, they tend to hand such projects off to me. Or in some cases they are so wowed that they learn Powershell for themselves.
When I'm at a customer site and desperately need to automate something, and it's the only tool I can and/or am allowed to get my hands on.
Little scripts to log into web sites and navigate to whatever page I'm interested in or working on. I never manually log into a web site that I'm developing anymore. Trivial, but that's one less annoying repeating brain dead task I need to worry about.
One-liners to copy files and projects around and search and replace.
Little scripts to do builds, if there are any unusual complications involved.
Etc. You are bound to have little quirks in your system, where you need to stop/start a service to fix something else, or whatever.
