I've struggled to get my head around grep, make and the like, and it's been tough. The Unix/Linux community is much smaller, and I just didn't have access to experts who could answer my newbie questions. I persevered, so I am something of a convert and I have to say that once you learn to use these tools they are both simple and powerful.

My motivation is that GUI tools change over the years and hence suffer from "software rot". If you have projects that are a few years old, when you left them they used to build cleanly, but now don't because:

A. You don't have the tools installed on a current PC and the new version of Windows screws up your installation (What do you mean, you can't even find the install disks, your PC doesn't have a floppy drive etc..)

B. The compiler security device can't be installed any more.

C. The old toolset doesn't understand long file names or long path variables.

Using command line tools has improved the maintainability of my old projects.