Ben,
Nice topic but hard to answer without lots of visual examples, because it is mostly a visual thing. I am not 100% sure I agree with TD about controlling the ball because its harder to know just how dry something is going to be. Sure, in a general sense, we might place a nursing slope on the right, and know it needs to be at least a few % to direct a ball left, but that can be from 3 to 10%, depending on watering, soils, etc. In most cases, that is a gca decision, on plan or in the field.
I do agree with most, although I have seen few shapers with real golf knowledge. I have worked with one shaper three times who has a habit of narrowing up my green front openings and adding contour to my greens. If we work together again......so bad shaping is part habit, or maybe not getting enough fill placed or having too big an ego. I have heard that "we did it this way for Fazio" and quickly tell them it doesn't matter.
There are actually a few Fazio shaping quirks that I really dislike, although there are few things I really have learned from. Hard to describe, but one of their strengths is often that their shaped land forms follow the natural contours rather than the new green or tee shapes, even if those are at "odd" angles to the feature. But nearly every Faz cousre has one green where the surrounding ridge just follows the edge of the green perfectly and looks terribly articial.
I felt like this was always a strength of Perry Maxwell shaping as well (whereas Press just did the 2,3,4, or 5 mounders, placed at predictable places around the green)
I hate to describe good shaping in terms of bad shaping that doesn't qualify!
The nuts and bolts things I think make for good shaping are following natural cues rather than design cues (as above), cutting swales in built features at a slight angle to the main slope. If they build two mounds, 90% of the time, the swale between them comes down at an almost perfect 90 degrees to the high point. Guys who can cut that swale at a slight angle start to automatically set up varing slopes on each side which always looks better. (Look at most green swales and they exit at 90 degrees to the green edge, too. Here again, Faz actually shines)
Tying in the bottom slopes seems to be more of a lost art, usually because of dirt shortages, but the toes of slopes need to flare out a bit, not continue down at their normal slope until the interstect the ground.
There is a tendency to repeat spacing, slopes, etc. on almost any built features, perhaps because the size of the dozer sort of dictates it. Look carefully, and many mounds are placed, say 45 feet apart in a repetion. Again, using natures cures rather than those on the joystick of the dozer yields better results, as does (in general) not moving dirt too far.
I probably haven't desribed it well. As above, maybe we should all post pix of good shaping, in our opinons.