Awk is great and this is a great post. But dang, awk really shoots itself so much with its lack of features that it so desperately needs!
Like: printing all but one column somewhere in the middle. It turns into long, long commands that really pull away from the spirit of fast fabrication unix experimentation.
jq and sql both have the same problem :)
“except Unicode escape sequences”
...And once you get away from the most basic, standard set of features, the several awks in existence have diverging sets of additional features.