I find it rather annoying to escape single quotes within single-quoted strings i...

I find it rather annoying to escape single quotes within single-quoted strings in the shell. Really, there are only two options, both of which are rather verbose:

  $ echo 'A'\''A, B'"'"'B'
  A'A, B'B

I suppose that there's a few different commands that would work for your example:

  $ echo "One Two Three" | awk '{print "'"'"'"$2" here'"'"'"}' # original
  $ echo "One Two Three" | awk {print\ \"\'\"\$2\"\ here\'\"}
  $ echo "One Two Three" | awk '{print "'\''"$2" here'\''"}'
  $ echo "One Two Three" | awk "{print \"'\"\$2\" here'\"}"

To be fair, though, the argument {print "'"$2" here'"} looks pretty weird if you're not used to working with awk.