There is a camp that says "If you want to work on windows, use the vendor supplied tools." While I don't sit in that camp, I can say that if you're genuinely sick of "this usability stuff" concerning ActiveState's version of perl to the point of giving up, Look into Powershell. It's a MASSIVELY HUGE LARGE ENORMOUS improvement over batch files, if you're willing to invest the time to learn it. The learning curve is a bit steep in my opinion, as the community is significantly smaller, as is the accompanying documentation, but it gets you well into the guts of the OS and FS in a way that I haven't seen matched.