I find these long articles about such tiny details odd - extremely nit-picky and ultimately pointless.

Granted this is only based on personal experience and the experiences of people I know. Basically people figure out the shift key in less than ten seconds and it's not an issue.

Is this really a big deal for people? It looks nice and it works well, who cares?

It seems like you can always arbitrarily argue that a certain design decision is better than some alternative - it feels more like bullshit than science.