yeah I am in the same pickle as the OP. I fell inlove with the shield. I love the .40 cartridge, and have a safe full of thestuff to shoot, so if its a shield, its gonna be in .40. My problem is that there DOES seem to be something wrong with the gun, that is why I did not purchase one yet.
1) an injction process barrel may not be strong enough
2) with the injection process barrel, there may be some "weak" barrels with microcrcks from the poor injection process. Hence the "I've shot 7 million rounds out of my shield" where the next guy almost gets his hand tanken off after 20 rounds.
3) the unsupported barrel theory. This one irks me the most. If S&W were serious about safety, why stone wall these failures or blame the ammo. Hey, it is not that hard to reengineer the barrel support of the full cartridge...why has that not happened yet?
4) not sure if they are troll posts or not, but it seems that instead of replacing a gun that went kabloom in the overnight mail, they offer to sell you one for $330? Jeez, whoever is running their marketing department probably failed to graduate highschool. So much bad will there. Millions of dollar in bad publicity.
5) a big recall of guns made before august 2013, means getting a used one is not advised.

I am starting to think it is not worth the grief. Looking at bigger guns, like the HK P2000sk now, maybe ruger, xps, walther.

IF S&W came out with a believable report on what is going on, and outlined their corrective action to fix the problem...maybe with independent lab corroboration....I would feel differently.

I guess its time to stop thinking about the shield 40