Sounds good to me. I think some day I will just sit down and crush a red bull and implement this.

Then again... there are like.. bash beautification tools out there... I wonder if one can do that automatically for us?

If I could chime in, I would like to suggest transitioning away from bash, rather than investing more into bash.

While bash is very useful for projects with little complexity, it become unwieldy as complexity grows. Transitioning over to a language like python would allow for better readability, maintainability, and portability while not affecting the overall efficiency of the tool.

Moving to a language like python would allow for you to easily add argument controls via the argparse library and would allow you to easily adopt plugins for different parts of the pipeline (for example using Shaka Packager for packaging).