Actually, the bash.tce package was flawed in that I left the name of the startup script to bash-3.2 when the extension name was bash.tce. That meant that when using tce-load even in the latest RC bash was not getting set up right. But on boot it was since all scripts in /usr/local/tce.installed get executed on boot. But tce-load expects the startup script to be of the same name as the extension, as it should be, so the bash extension was not getting set up right because of the startup script being named wrong.
It has been fixed and reuploaded. Sorry for the cost in time it has caused anyone.
/bin/bash is created as a symlink to /usr/local/bin/bash by the startup script, and when that was borked bash was basically unavailable for use by scripts. Please report back if redownloading the bash extension does not solve the issue.