Mike - my oldest friend is a successful actor who used to do stage and films and television but for several years now has been almost exclusively on television. Some of the shows he's done are of much higher quality than others, and I kid him sometimes that, for an actor, doing Shakespeare must be a lot easier than doing bad television. With Shakespeare, all an actor has to do is speak the lines -- the writing is so good that the emotions and drama take care of themselves; whereas with a mediocre television show, an actor has to act his ass off just to try to make the crappy writing understandable, let alone emotional and dramatic. All of which is to say: when I read your opening post, my first thought was that, just as an actor can only be as good as the material he's given, so too can a shaper only be as good as the architect he's working for/the design he's working on. Like the actor, he can be worse than the material/design, but he'd be hard pressed to be any better. I think of some of the courses I've played where the shaping seems uninspired, and then I 'step back' on try to see what the shaper had to work with design-wise and I realize that he could hardly have done any better, given the 'material' he was given. No doubt, as you say, shapers are much different today than they were in the 70s -- but like actors they can be incredibly talented and dedicated but if they don't choose their 'parts' right their work can never really shine, or shine through. It seems to me that a good architect can make a shaper look great much more easily than a good shaper can make an architect look great.
Peter