There is tremendous range in what a "shell script" might be. I vastly prefer bash to sh as a user shell. Often times, I have bits of logic I express in a command that I want to capture and reuse, and they get grabbed and dropped in a (frequently context specific) bin directory. I would contend that these "save me from typing it out" shell scripts should mimic what I would type myself. Once they wind up being more general, I usually rewrite them in a different language entirely. That's a very different context than something like an init script, though.