Indeed. The heat shield in particular was extremely delicate and tended to get beaten up a lot coming back, so that was a huge amount of work to get ready for the next flight.

The entire spaceplane concept drastically complicated things. Capsule-based return systems are vastly simpler to operate, which is despite everything the Soyuz has been flying continuously this whole time.

Downside is you can't capture enemy satellites and return them to ground for study/reverse engineering.

This is how NASA got many billions of funding from the USAF for part of the space shuttle program - look through the list of flights in the 1980s where the payload was an unspecified national security satellite. The capability was promised and it was funded for it - but almost never used. The actual ability to grab a big thing and return it was hardly ever used, such as the LDEF mission. It doesn't help that a huge percentage of Soviet satellites that they might want to have grabbed would have been unreachable from a space shuttle launch site (IMINT satellites in 90 degree inclination polar orbits, satellites in molniya orbits, radar naval observation satellites in MEO orbits) all beyond the orbit/delta-V capabilities of a shuttle mission. And of course geostationary orbit where no human has ever gone.