It's important to note the space shuttle was a poor design in large part because it added a lot of cargo on a man rated system. 1 failure to achieve orbit in 135 missions is an outstanding record, but very wasteful when sending cargo. A capsule seems better in large part because it does not.

Further, if the shuttle was only sending people to orbit it's design could be both reusable and vastly simpler because of vastly lower rentry temperatures and more redundancy.