Love the way you tell the story from your thoughts, to the impressive infrastructures going through the engineers feelings and making personal jokes. I need to improve my storytelling skills :P
Shuttle was a very impressive system, but expensive and not so reusable, but it was fitting into our dreamy vision of planes to the space.
Apparently, astronauts used to say that going up in a russian soyuz and coming back in a shuttle was the safest way to orbit: security systems for soyuz start working since before launch and make escape very easy. In the other way, while the shuttle glides with forces about 1.6-3Gs, the soyuz reentry is typically 4.5, but can be worse.
Anyway, it looks like the shuttle project is a relic from the cold war era, a demonstration of the capability to launch systems that can land in the same place in less than 1 orbit. That is why the soviet had a copycat project, the Buran.
But with most national agencies testing reentry systems now... maybe we will see new shuttle generations soon