Not at all.  Demand for features essentially implies both confidence in our ability to deliver as well as conveys demand for LTCD as a whole.  That said, and this was a perfect example of it, but fixes are generally more important than features which is why the original difficulty shield update (feature) was so important.  We needed a module that would be useful for making us multipool resistant at the time, and shield did its job nicely.  Once again we tried a traditional hard fork, and it failed due to a combination of heavy-handed pool operators that were not able (or not willing) to update in time and what could be seen as a bug in bitcoin proper.  Shield provided us with a nice workaround for the issue by making possible the capability of writing a tiny (~8-10 lines of code) module for the shield engine that once again reinforces the benefit we could gain by moving as much of LTCD out of core as possible.