Indeed. That's why I list them as limitations. My original idea was to get everything done with Bash. This is however not feasible as the reasons listed. Maybe I can get rid of jq and perl using awk, but that would sacrifice a lot of simplicity and readablity of the code.

I think implementing the syntax highlighter is the bottom line of my insist. I would prefer not to write anything more complex than that with Bash. They will be either not supported, or supported via external plugins.