[Forte S+W]

I really have to question precisely what roles folks who call the Shockwave "mostly useless" had in mind in the first place.

I bought mine for the following purposes: Home Defense and my own personal amusement, and while I've fortunately never had to use my Shockwave for Home Defense, I have no doubt in my ability to hit a man-sized target within the same distances I might encounter a Home Invader. For the secondary role, it succeeds in spades because it's a cool gun with impressive results downrange. But then again, I'm not trying to hit targets hundreds of yards away, expecting levels of accuracy that only a novice would expect was possible from a scattergun with a 14" cylinder bore barrel, no stock, and only a brass bead front sight.

Seriously, plenty of shooters on YouTube, including ones who are/were competitive shooters seemingly have no issues hitting their targets at reasonable distances with the Shockwave, ergo I can only conclude that those who refer to the Shockwave as "mostly useless" either had unrealistic expectations of its capabilities, or were just calling it "mostly useless" as click-bait for their articles/videos, then purposely placing it in cherry-picked scenarios in which it would obviously perform poorly in attempt to make their click-baity title appear more legitimate to the lay person who doesn't know any better.
Unfortunately, Chris Baker has developed something of a habit of producing click-baity articles/videos over the past couple of years. Personally, I think that if he's that desperate for traffic, then he should revive the "Shooting Outdoors" series of videos with Manny Mansfield. A lot of people, (myself included) found his Manny Mansfield character extremely entertaining, and he could go right ahead making the same questionable claims as Manny Mansfield, but with the excuse that he's doing a character to preserve his credibility for when he actually feels like making a serious video.